The big hug - part 2

If you don't know part 1 of the big hug yet, you can find it here.

We left off at the cliffhanger of my dropping my boro lampwork shark on the kitchen floor. The nose and tail broke off, but I could only find part of the tail.
Then something unexpected happened that I can honestly not explain. At least a week later, I found the other piece of the tail, but have no idea where it suddenly came from because I had searched the whole kitchen floor. My best bet is that it had flown even further and the cats found it and knocked it back into the kitchen.
Anyhow, I suddenly had a bit of hope that maybe, just maybe, I would be able to do something with it. Not what I had planned, not what I really wanted which would make me 100% happy, but something that was still good.

Now how to achieve that?
Obviously I had to glue the shark first. My complicated relationship with glue has long been a running joke among my friends. Much longer than my jewelry-making journey. It's a miracle I don't still have things glued to my fingers from years ago (that's actually a thing for me). I'm terrible with glue and my experience told me that the shark would not be perfect.
Surprise! Not. Of course it wasn't perfect.
So I would have to find a way to hide the scars the best I could. Distracting from them with gold as I had done for my friend's broken dolphin wasn't an option for me because the octopus is copper. Leaving the tail off completely and disguising it - unlike that of my shark the dolphin's tail never turned up again - wasn't an option either because I had the tail and love that long fin.

The tough part about hiding the scars would be that the one through the nose is very close to the eye and that there's a quite massive glass loop on the tail (it is a pendant after all). Had the shark been like a cab, all the way flat on the back, I might have been able to glue it completely onto some backing.
Even before starting I knew I wouldn't be all that happy with the nose part. Oh well.

What exactly should I do, though?
It was obvious that bead embroidery was the only way to go. As I said, this shark is much smaller than the other ones and was even more fragile now (haha). Just wrapping the octopus to it wouldn't make for a very sturdy construction.

So instead I would glue the shark onto the backing where possible, then sew the loop to it and hide it under beads. I would also glue the octopus's head as well as possible (there are wires from the wrapping in the back which lift it up a bit) just to make it hold safely enough while arranging the tentacles around the shark.

Please excuse this bad picture. It's one of my infamous
night time WIP pics and is usually just intended
 for friends. Actually, I had to retrieve it from an old
Facebook message. I hardly ever take real WIP pictures.

This, my friends, sounds a lot easier than it actually is. I first sewed the tentacles on in a few spots. Copper is pliable and can still very stubbornly refuse to do what you want, especially in thick wire wrapped like this, even more so if you go wild with tentacle loops. I would have loved to preserve more of the flow from the WIP pic, but that would have been very wide for a focal for myself.
Of course I would have to sew down the tentacles some more after deciding on bead placement.

So I did all of that and then I had a lot of space for beads. I didn't want to buy new beads at the time. I had a load of seed and cube beads in different sizes and a variety of blue, clear, green, purple, and who has been following my jewelry making for a while knows I can't resist pearls in water scenes.
I started in what I consider (my) classic bead embroidery meaning going in bead rows lying next to each other. Very organized looking, I thought it would make a nice calm background for the hug.
One corner in, I had to admit to myself that I hated it. Because of the thick wire, those tentacles aren't laying flat. So there are not only beads around them, but also quite a few over and  under them. There are also beads under the shark and over the scars (I'm indeed not all that happy with the nose part, but couldn't manage any better without concealing the eye) and under the octopus's head - and getting in these spaces in nice organized rows? Yeah, it didn't work.
I can't tell you how long it took me to embroider that background, one or two beads at a time.

A slightly better WIP picture, still meant for
friends. It doesn't do the sparkle in the
goldstone or the shark justice.

Next up - my old enemy, finishing jewelry.
Two months and still no chain.
Then, however, I remembered my mermaid (this is one big piece of jewelry, but luckily went to a customer who loves it big).

I still had some copper crimps and the faux leather ribbon whose colors worked well with the background.
When I tried it out, though, I didn't like the look of it after all. Somehow the focal seemed to call for a copper chain to go with the octopus.
Rummaging through my supply drawers, however, I only found chain in the wrong size and I really, really didn't want to make my own chain. So I went online shopping instead, but again the chains were either too small or didn't have the right look.
In the end, I found infinity links, which seem to mimic the loops of the tentacles, and used them with jump rings to make a chain. Luckily, I bought just the right amount!

Is this my vision? Heck no, it couldn't be much further from it. I wanted the octopus and the shark all by themselves, maybe with a few beads to hint at the ocean. Had the breaks be in different spots, I might have managed to do it.

Did I save the shark, though? I think so. Another broken piece that didn't go into the trash, but will be shining on. (The urge to get philosophical about broken beauty is big, but I'll spare you!)

The big hug - Part 1

Over ten years ago, I got several boro lampwork pendants from a very talented artisan, manatees (you can see one of them here), a dolphin (you have seen him before as well), and a shark. The pendants are absolutely gorgeous, but it took months for them to ship which put me off ordering more. That's a real pity because I have not seen any since that come even close to them.
Also the shark broke in transport. I got a replacement, but I was determined to find a way of using the broken one as well (I've done that more than once with components, but of course never sold those).

If you haven't noticed it yet, I don't just love sharks, but also octopuses.
This is a picture of just some of those I made over the years. A tiny one, bigger ones, a really big one. Ah, have you already seen it? Sharks!

I experimented with the broken pendant first. The idea had been to hide the glue marks behind tentacles, but show as much of the shark as possible.
It needed a lot of fiddling, but I managed. The pendant got the official name "The hug" because to me those two were friends rather than enemies.
If you think the second octopus-shark hug was easier to make with the experience gained, you would be wrong. Lampwork is really slippery and the tentacles had to sit just the right way to hold the shark safely. The loop on the back of the tail is the only spot where the octopus is actually wired to the shark itself.

The second pendant sold and the first one went to a friend (of course she knew about the glued spots).
I'll be honest, I quickly regretted not keeping one for myself, simply because it proved impossible to find another shark like these.

After searching for a long time, I finally found one and was so happy! It was much smaller than the other ones, but so beautiful.
Somehow I never got around to making something with it, though. There was always something else to try out and wirework was already becoming more difficult for me.
When it started getting really hard on my thumb, however, I knew it was now or never before I wouldn't be able to do it anymore at all. It had been a while since I had played with copper and it felt so good, but it took a lot of breaks to get my octopus finished over the next few weeks.

Talking of breaks ... when I was finally done and wanted to take the octopus to the kitchen to oxidize it, I missed that the shark, which had been in the same box, got tangled in some still loose wire ends. Yes, you have be quite stupid not to notice you are holding two things, but sometimes I am.

It could have fallen in the hallway on the one vinyl floor I have, but no, it fell in the kitchen, on the hardest of all my floors.
You know how some things seem to be happening in slow motion and yet it's impossible for you to do anything about them? Like the time I cut my finger and fingernail with the bread knife and my brain only woke up and told me not to cut there when I had already started bleeding like crazy.
There wasn't a chance for me to catch the shark before it hit the tiles and pieces started jumping. The nose and the tail had broken off (seems to be a thing, the same happened to my friend with her dolphin). I could only find the nose and part of the tail, though.

It may sound ridiculous to you, but I was devastated.
I couldn't replace this shark, no matter how much I looked around. There were a few lampwork sharks, both pendants and figurines and they were pretty, no doubt about that, but none of them had this elegance, none of them spoke to me.
I didn't even want to look at the octopus anymore which says a lot.
Then something unexpected happened and yes, I'm totally saying this as a cliffhanger.

See you for part 2, I hope!

Happy Birthday! or Friday the 13th

Happy Birthday to me! Or not?
This is not something I usually do, congratulate myself, I mean, but I will reach the big 60 soon and that seemed like a good occasion to make something for myself in time.
It's not a medal for making it that far ... although years ago I did make a "medal" for a colleague for her 40th work anniversary (I'm close to that one myself, ugh). Just as a joke of course, we gave her something nice, too.

No, of course I wanted something beautiful and something that was yelling my name.
There was something I had been planning for years now, but I didn't know if my fingers were up for it. Wire wrapping has become so hard for me, but I really wanted this.

I had written until here and then this happened today.

After several days with a lot of breaks - and a lot of whining - the piece was ready to be oxidized. I took it to the kitchen and then there was that sound. The lampwork shark I wanted to use with the octopus had been tangled in the tentacles - the irony because that had been the plan - without my noticing it (both my own fault) and it had fallen to the ground.

Couldn't it have fallen three steps earlier in the hallway with the PVC floor which would have given it a better chance? Well, it didn't. I glued the two pieces I could find back on as best I could, but one part is missing. Now I'm heartbroken because I can't get another shark like it.

I had been saving that shark for myself for years.
It won't get thrown away, but I don't know if I will be able to make something with it. It will definitely not work with the octopus. I don't even know if I want to finish that now and also didn't feel like taking a picture of the octopus WIP or the broken shark 😭

I just needed to vent.

I made an octopus!

You may want to say that you already know that I made an octopus ... or two or five or ten ... after all I had shown a collage of them in 2019 in this long post. Of course I didn't stop making them after this, but the wire had been on the back burner for a while now because new techniques had to be explored which also happened to be easier on my hands than the wire most of the time.

That doesn't mean the wire has stopped calling me, though, so when I was asked to make a custom octopus pendant, I couldn't say no.
I love that none of them comes out the same. Tentacles with one or two wires, with beads or without beads, the head with a cab or without, and best of all - I never know myself what they will look like in the end. Making the tentacles go wild is really the most fun about this. It may seem they are random, but they are not.
The first one starts out randomly, but the next ones are based on it, and often I go back to fiddling on the first again, too.
I like to think the octopus head is telling me what to do ;-)

For this one, a cab was required and the choice was a lovely moss agate cab.
I used moss agate on a custom order before, only in that case the stone was large and dark green and not just the size requirements for the pendant were very specific, I also had to use exactly 23 moss agate beads in the two-wired tentacles which weren't supposed to spread out, all of which made the job a bit of a puzzle.

This time, I was allowed to go wild as long as I added enough moss agate beads to the tentacles and achieved a certain length, and I enjoyed it immensely.
So this is the latest addition to my little octopus family (and I'm already hatching new ideas in my head ;-)).

Art Elements Design Challenge and Blog Hop - Octopuses

First of all ... you are free to think of these as octopi or octopodes, should you so prefer, but while I used to say octopi and loved my octopi t-shirt, I now like how fun it sounds to say octopuses, and it's not wrong (thank you, Merriam-Webster).

Second, when Claire announced the topic for the Art Elements August theme challenge - Octopus - I did a little chair dance. Not only do I love octopuses, but I may also be slightly obsessed with making them.
I first got inspired by the polymer clay octopus my friend Star made and which is looking at me at this very moment.
 

It took me quite a few hours to crochet my octopus from wire. The man came later and was not meant to end up in the tentacles, but you know how those things happen. They are still in their deadly (?) embrace sitting in the ocean department of my Steiff collection.

Then there was Hank, the little lampwork thief, also crocheted from wire.

After a long break from making octopuses (but never not loving them) I started wire weaving, and that really got me going. Instead of telling you each single story I made a little collage (minus one of which it seems I didn't take a picture). There's tiny Barney at the top, and now you can tell how I more and more became obsessed by twisting those tentacles. Gosh, they are fun to make!!

So I decided on a big piece for this challenge, and maybe a small one. The small one hasn't happened yet, and I honestly didn't think I'd finish the big one in time although I started really early this time. My first step was to order small cabs.

Why? This is why.



I wanted octopus babies of my own, but instead of making them all one color, I decided on a multitude of colors. I chose agate, sodalite, zoisite, jasper, aventurine, amethyst, rose quartz, and more. Each cab got its own kind of weave, and voilà - an army of octopus babies, ready to take over the world, mwahahaaaaaa!

Actually this was the easy part. How to put them together now? I could dangle them from a chain, but a tentacle army is not quite as effective if those tentacles keep tangling. I kept laying them out like this and like that, I think they got rather tired of me.

Just two days ago I suddenly knew what I wanted to do. The video should have given me the idea much earlier. Those babies needed a mom!
One of my easiest exercises - well, not really because by now I began getting nervous about finishing this in time. AND I still didn't know how to put it all together in the end.
A little deep breathing, a lot of cursing and some dramatic yelling "I can't do this, I'm useless!" later I had done it - almost. Hard to believe and still true, you can run out of exactly that one kind of chain that you need while still having all others. I just found enough to connect my babies in the back, though. Phew.

I rarely make big, over the top necklaces, but this is one of them, and I love each little tentacle.
Taking a picture, however, wasn't easy, it was a little crowded in that light tent and a little too early in the morning to take a picture in the garden, and on top of that I only had four hours of sleep.
I'll try to come up with something better later, so please bear with me.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a blog hop. Once again I ask you, no, I order you to go to these links and see what the other participants have come up with. It's worth it, honestly. Do it now. Thank you ;-)

Guests

Cat (that's me ;-)) - Evie and Beth - Hope - Karen - Kathy - Melissa - Michelle - Rozantia - Sarajo - Tammy

AE team members

Cathy - Claire - Jenny - Laney - Lindsay - Marsha

Last but not least I want to thank Claire for this fantastic topic. I have a feeling she and I share the same love of octopuses ....

P.S. Oops, almost forgot my own polymer clay octopus. That won't do, he's grumpy enough as it is! ;-)

Tackle that stash - Barney the Tiny Octopus

Strictly speaking this is not a stash tackler - it's a let me rip something up and then use the stone in something else tackler. Of course there are pieces I'm not that happy with anymore or I have a better idea for a stone or beads. Those pieces are almost as dangerous as WIPs because they need attention that you don't always have.
From time to time, however, I manage to do a little spring cleaning that can actually be kind of inspiring, too. At the moment there is one or the other cab that has wandered back into my stash drawer.

One of them was this little moss agate that had been sitting in a pendant before which had been asked for by someone who then disappeared. It happens. The pendant stayed, but when I looked for a small cab for some wire weaving, I remembered it and didn't hesitate to rip it up, after all it had been quite a while.

When I fitted the cab into the weaving, I suddenly noticed something. A long time ago a friend had told me a story about how she was in Greece once and about tiny octopuses - and there he was. A tiny octopus with the name Barney both of which came to me out of nowhere, with tiny tentacles and a big head.
That's the reason why the bail is not sitting in the middle. Barney insisted on swimming to the left. No idea what he will find there. Maybe his friend, the fish, is hanging out there waiting for him to go see the Arielle movie or have some, well, seafood together? (Oh, bad pun, bad pun, I know, don't hit me!)
Barney can be found in my shop now, why don't you go visit him? ;-)

Grumpy - and an octopus

I guess it was bound to happen.
You can't just go, buy a can of resin and expect it to work right away. A new technique, even if you just want to seal something, needs time. Practice. Patience. An increasing moon in the second house of Venus in retrograde.
Heck, yeah, I have no idea what I'm talking about!

But how embarrassing is it to say - I wanted to open the can and couldn't. There were two clasps on it and when I tried to take them off I broke my favorite pair of scissors (earned the hard way by spending too much money on cat food, it was a gift from my cat food shop, but it was such a good one!). Then I bent up the lid all the way around. It looked a little like modern art, but I tried to get IN there, thank you very much!
Finally I did. At first I thought there was a layer of whatever on it, but I guess it was dried whatever, eh, resin. I got rid of it and hopefully stuck a wooden stick into the resin. Ehm, wasn't that supposed to be kind of, eh, like, eh, liquid? Yes, that was exactly how I stood there. Actually my whole face was one big "eh".

I had read the instructions. This can had not been in the cold for a few days, so what was going on here? I read the instructions again, this time in Finnish. You never know what you miss if you only read the German ones. After noticing that I held the paper upside down, I went back to the German ones after all.
"Put the can in a hot water bath for 10 minutes." I'm not a cook, but that is my easiest exercise. Pot, water, stove, let the water sizzle, but not boil. 10 minutes exactly. Ping.
Another attempt at stirring the mass, but this time it tried to eat the wooden stick. I checked the can again. There, it said "resin", not "alien sticky blobby mass from Vungula IV". Hm, maybe another 10 minutes. Maybe it's like watching milk. I should just let it do its stuff whatever that may be and do something else.

What about that abandoned bezel whose color I didn't like for the Septarian? I could make something for it from polymer clay. I measured the bezel, mixed some blue and black. A deep water scene with seaweed in green and white. Little silver fish. This turned out to be much more fun than watching the can.
From time to time I went over to the stove to check on the alien. It tried to eat another wooden stick, but apart from that it stayed unchanged. Ugly words floated around in my head.

Where the octopus came from, I don't know. He happened, like many of my designs happen, but once he was in my head, I immensely enjoyed the process of wrapping seaweed round his tentacles and the other way round.
The eyes were last. I wondered if I should give him a cutesy look, but suddenly these slightly evil eyes were staring at me. I tell you what, I don't say that often, but I love him just the way he is and I think I'll keep him for myself.


As for the resin? After wasting energy for about an hour I gave up on it. For now, that is. I won't let a transparent alien beat me, no sir!