Tackle that stash - Jasper and mookaite

More than four years ago I talked about jasper in a "tackle the stash" post. I told the story of the first jasper I liked and how I finally managed to make the right piece with it.
I don't know why, but mookaite - which is actually also a kind of jasper and comes from Australia - was another stone I didn't like much for a long time. I didn't use to work with earthy colors a lot and mookaite for me was always light brown together with a brownish red. Stupid me. Mookaite comes in many different colors, often combined in one stone, and so I guess it had to happen that I fell in love with it after all.

I've had these jasper donuts for a very long time. They came in a set with silver earring components and four more pairs of stone donuts. One of the components broke and so the stones were left over waiting for a new purpose. Over time, they got scattered here and there which is the reason that, after making earrings with the dark red jasper and the serpentine, I only had one snowflake obsidian and one light red jasper donut left. The other day, however, I had the luck to find the pair of picture jaspers.

My first thought was desert, my second one mookaite.
I'm really happy with the combination of the earthy jasper color and the rich red of the mookaite, and I think the gold ties the colors together neatly.

Now where are the second obsidian and red jasper ...... I know they must be here somewhere!

Oldies but Goodies - More jasper

Some years ago we already had a Jewelry Artisans Community Oldies but Goodies Challenge with the topic jasper. Back then I told the story of the first tumbled rock I bought. I could edit that post now to say that I finally made something with that rock, a humble jasper that was the first one to let me see the beauty of non-sparkly stones.

Now we are back with a new challenge and new kinds of jaspers. There are so many varieties and one is more beautiful than the other. I hope you will like what we have done with them.

1 RioRita
2 The Crafty Chimp
3 Jewelry Art by Dawn
4 Cat's Wire
5 My Bijou Life

Tackle that stash - Tiny sheep

This year one of the old jewelry stores in my hometown shut its door for good after about 100 years. While it hadn't been a store I used to frequent myself - in fact I can only remember one time I asked about something in there - I often walked by it on my way to or from the train station, and I often had a look at the windows because they didn't just offer modern jewelry, but also had displays of vintage jewelry and even loose stones or pearls.
Before they closed, they had a sale, and my sister and I went in a last time to have a look.

Next to the counter they had a big glass bowl with small cabs and faceted stones, some real, some synthetic. The lady said they kept those for children coming in with customers which I thought was a sweet idea.
Even though I am not a child anymore, I took two small jasper cabs as a memory with the intention on making something from them eventually.

When I was asked about a sheep a while ago, I remembered these two cabs that had finally made it from my purse to my stash drawer and thought that one of them would make a cute little sheep prototype in copper. When will I learn that tiny doesn't mean easier to make? ;-) The whole pendant including the bail is just 1 inch high and 1 1/3 inch wide!
At least I learned a few things from it for the next sheep. As I said, this is a prototype that I will keep, so yes, there are tool marks, the ear is a bit too small and the head maybe a bit too large. I still think it's kind of cute :-D

Tackle that stash or Creating new (old) stash

Years ago the "Pfingstmarkt" in Wäschenbeuren was a regular date in our annual calendar. This market takes place on Pentecost (Monday which is also a holiday here) each year, in a village about six miles from my hometown.
One part of it is a flea and antique market, the other is a typical market with anything from local honey, hand knitted socks, herbal teas, aprons, t-shirts, ingenious vegetable graters, and of course there are also food stalls to keep people going. I haven't been there for years, mainly for lack of transportation because it's a bit of a hassle with buses on holidays.

When I was younger, I wasn't a fan of jasper. I usually saw it in the form of tumbled rocks that I didn't have any use for, and on top of that jasper doesn't sparkle. I loved gemstones and still do today.
I grew older and (hopefully ;-)) a little wiser, though, and learned to appreciate the beauty of other stones, no matter if they were translucent or opaque. And eventually I got myself a tumbled leopard jasper rock from a jewelry stand at the Pfingstmarkt, one of those that also had one of those big boxes with a variety of rocks in it. I still didn't have any real use for it, and afterwards I wouldn't have been able to say why I wanted to have it except that it had jumped out at me, but I always felt that this was the rock that started to make me change my view of jasper.

After I started making jewelry, I made a few attempts to use the rock. Nothing really convinced me, though. This was not a small stone, it needed some big design, and I was better at incorporating tiny beads in my pieces. I crocheted or knitted more than one bezel for the jasper, but nothing worked.

This brings me to my topic of creating new/old stash.
Lately I have been ripping up some old pieces. A few had never even been listed anywhere because I was not completely sure about them myself, and I felt kind of a relief when I ripped them up and put the cabs or beads back into my stash. One of them was the jasper.
You have no idea how often this particular rock had come back to haunt me. Some pieces sleep in a drawer and some of those I even forget I ever had. The jasper, however, always ended up somewhere where I found it again.
And now I think I finally found its destination after, oh, probably about 20 years - and I'm happy with it. Miracles do happen.

Tackle that stash - Stone Canyon Jasper pendant

I'm back! And what could be better to get back into blogging than a nice stash tackler?
To be honest there is little stash tackling in this pendant, though.

It's not the first time I am telling you that I am struggling with asymmetry. It's funny because there had been no struggle at all in ordering this interesting brecciated jasper. I came, saw, and bought.
Then I was carrying it around in my coat pocket for two weeks. When there's an order in my mailbox, I can never wait until I am upstairs, you know. I have to rip it open right there and then. As my veggie box arrived that same moment, I just shoved this and another cab into my pocket and kept forgetting to take them out.

Yesterday I finally remembered and just when I was about to bury them in the drawer with my other cabs - that have been waiting for too long to get out of there for good - I decided I'd give this a shot.
I turned the jasper this way and that way hoping it would tell me what it wanted.
The earthy colors called for copper wire and to pick up the browns from the stone I added transparent brown seed beads to the knitted bezel.

Next was the decision which way to turn the cab for the bail. I am always drawn to turn drop like shapes upside down and the fact that I love my dangles usually influences me to follow that urge.
The brown pearl was perfect with it.

Now which cab to choose next? Decisions, decisions!

Tackle that stash - Necklace with Biggs jasper and freshwater pearls

Welcome back to "Tackle that stash"! *insert merry jingle here*
I know it has been a while. Don't think that I haven't made anything during the time. I started a personal project, the "fan wall", so far with one bead loomed portrait of a favorite actor, I played around with new beading techniques and with patterns. Somehow none of them made it onto the blog, though.

Now I am back with an announcement.
I love jasper. Yeah, ok, so I said it before, but I really can't imagine why there was a time when I thought it was boring just because it didn't sparkle.
Whenever my muse Mabel is out of town and takes my beading mojo with her, I grab a cab. Not always does that actually make something happen, but sometimes it does.
This great Biggs jasper cabochon had been in my stash far too long because I wasn't able to decide on a color combination.
Picking it up for the umpteenth time I finally decided to go for the earthy look, use some copper wire and see where it would take us, that's the Biggs and me. Wire knit bezels are fun for me. They leave so much options to play with them, add another layer, connect those layers, add beads on the inside or outside. With a wire knit bezel I hardly ever know what it will look like in the end.

In this case I ended up with chocolate brown pearls which look good enough to eat and a brown rope to pick up the colors of the jasper. Aren't they perfect together?
Now tell me again - why didn't I use to like jasper?

Oldies but Goodies - Jasper

Way before I even thought about making jewelry, I hung out in shops where you could buy tumbled rocks among other things (for me it was more the scarfs and incense sticks). I have to admit that I looked down on most of them because they didn't sparkle. There were some nice colors, yeah, but I didn't see their true beauty back then. 
Things have changed over the years. It was at a little village fair where I got my first tumbled rock, a picture jasper. I still have that one, by the way.

This week the Jewelry Artisans Community's Oldies but Goodies Challenge was about jasper. You should have a look because there were more beautiful stones than just these ones.

1 Jewelry Art by Dawn
2 Violetmoon's Corner
3 Cat's Wire
4 The Crafty Chimp
5 MC Stoneworks
 
Today I also have an extra picture. I got this Owyhee Jasper cab many years ago, too. Can you see the mountains in the back, the branch at the top, the lake and the trees? This cab won't go anywhere, I'll treasure it. About time I made something with it, don't you think?

Komodo sun

No, I'm not out to "hunt" the dragons, but the dragons ... wait, let me start at the beginning.

You know that with most of what I do I'm not bound to a certain spot. Somehow I haven't had one of my night sessions in my library armchair for a while, but last night I went up there and got drawn in by my Robin Hood DVD (the old BBC TV series) while rummaging through my storage box. It's amazing what things you can find when you haven't even been looking for them, that strand of andalusite I had been saving, some silver beads I had forgotten about, Tundura sapphires, a small bag of leopard skin jasper and an agate ring.

After a little thinking, humming along with Robin's Merry Men and fiddling I had an idea and this is the result. The way the beads lie next to each other reminded me of a lizard ... a dragon ... Komodo! And when I found the matte black agate I still had fit right into the middle, I was really happy.

Komodo sun pendant

Nothing much has been happening in my life beside that. I read, I work, I play, I get tortured by the cats (Ponder cooking bead soup for me by jumping on my bead mats for example), I get loved by the cats (nothing like a tiny cat like Meffi sleeping on your head, yup, not next to my head), pretty normal everything and probably pretty boring to you. Sorry about that ;-)

On a ring trip

From time to time I go through my stash of beads together with my muse. She points out beads that I had forgotten or some that I don't have many left of. Sometimes she will even find a half-forgotten WIP.
Perfect projects for those occasions are rings. They are fun to make because you can always choose a new combination of wire and beads.

This is what she came up with this weekend.
First of all she found a WIP I had made quite a while ago, then "lost" underneath something else. I hadn't decided yet if I wanted it to be a pendant, a collier or a ring. My first attempt at a ring had failed on a day when I was very impatient, so off into the box it went.
What I had so far, was a crocheted dome of sterling silver wire with faceted little moonstones. Too pretty to hang out in a WIP box with their blue flashes and sparkle.
I got stubborn and finally did it. One down, only one million to go. Yesss!


Then my muse (I wonder if she needs a name, time for another poll? Let me know what you think!) gave me some lovely frosted 4 mm amethyst beads that had been left after making the Winter Berries necklace.
Perfect for this ring in fine silver wire, don't you think?


I have only tried to spool knit brass wire once. It was not a success because it doesn't bend the way copper does. So I still had this ugly necklace lying around. It's always hard for me to throw something away, but there was no chance I could have saved it. Snip, snip, snip - welcome back, little jasper cubes.
I find they look much better on this ring (what you can't see in this picture that on this ring the wire is crocheted in a different direction than the others, I can be soooo innovative at times :-P).


When I wanted to take the pictures to list the rings, I found ... or rather, I didn't find (it was a very negative feeling) no charged batteries. Ten batteries and all of them dead? That delayed the listing a little, but I hope they'll be in one of my shops soon. The rings, not the batteries ;-)

Meet Jo! ;-)

This is Jo. I didn't want to call her "The Head", after all she is gonna have to help me modeling my things. This morning we did a little test run with my hats. She doesn't want to smile, but I think it was ok for her, too. After all we were not in a hurry, no Paris fashion shows under pressure in this house.
I guess you will get to see her more often from now on :-)



I am still on the bangle trip. This one is from wire that looks more like brass, it's thicker gauge and very sturdy and it was probably not too smart to give the wire an extra twist every few stitches to give it a different look. Afterwards my fingers hurt, ouch. I think the effort was worth it, though.



This is antique looking thicker gauge copper wire with hematite. I really like this one. It looks much better in real, but hey, it's not easy making pictures at 6 a.m. Especially if you are tired and only up because the furry masters commanded you to. Oh, and if your camera is nothing special. And if you are just a lousy photographer like me :-P



Egg and copper ... I did it and it worked. Why shouldn't it have, though? Everybody told me it would. It looks much better on this agate than the shiny copper. I'll have to buy more eggs, I guess.



Now I should really get myself into gear. I'll go visit a friend overnight and there are still a few things to do around here. It's amazing how fast 5 hours can go by if you don't want them to. On the other hand ... I want to meet my friend and therefore want them to go by. Nah, too complicated for me now, I'll just get going. Litter boxes, here I come!!!