Oh, the things I go through for you.
In fact I'll now watch the movie to this quote, so I wouldn't feel bad about just picking the quote because I stumbled upon it by accident. Someone offered me to bring the movie before and I declined.
Who knows, maybe I'll even change my choice of quote. Well, okay, see you in ... oh, more than two hours?? I better give you something to do. And just in case I'll need a break for lunch or something, let's make it three hours.
Okay, this was more entertaining than I had expected. Let's go for some werewolf hunting ... a werewolf who came in from the rain.
Carl: Why does it smell like wet dog in here?
Van Helsing: Werewolf!
Carl: Alright, you'll be needing silver bullets then (throwing a bag with bullets)
Van Helsing: Well done!
Yup, Van Helsing. We have werewolves, of course vampires and Frankenstein's monster. Quite a feat to get all of that into one movie. Don't expect too much, just sit back and have a bit of weekend afternoon fun. And never forget that Carl is the real hero here ;-)
Van Helsing, USA/Czech Republic, 2004
I know that this pendant is not cute and not elegant. The tumbled labradorite is not shiny and smooth and only shows some flashes of blue and yellow in some spots - more than in these pictures that I took at night, though - and it doesn't even have a regular shape.
Actually this lab was never meant to end up as a prominent focal. I had intended to use it as background for a wire wrapped tree.
I'm not sure what changed my mind after the wire knit bezel was finished. Often if I like a cab in its setting, I add stones or pearls to surround it in order to give it a vintage inspired or a romantic look. This cab however needed something more archaic.
This was the moment when I remembered the spikes.
It has been a while since the Jewelry Artisans Community members came together not only for a challenge, but also a blog carnival. You know how it is, sometimes life gets in the way and everyone is busy, busy, busy.
With a new year beginning we decided that our challenge would be to learn something new. How often have I said I'd like to try this or that and never got around to it ... countless times! Now when I was determined to take on the task, I couldn't think of anything spontaneously. The month went by and I was almost sure I would have to drop out, but then I got inspired by a very talented artist, Lauren from Lauren's Creations on Zibbet.
I have seed beads, I have wire - even if it wasn't the perfect gauge - so I looked for some basic instructions and so I finally finished my first attempt at French beading.
What is French beading, though? It's a very old technique, but no one really knows when it started. Using beads and wire flowers were crafted for decoration, memorial wreaths, or wall hangings. If you want to know more, here's just one article about the subject.
There's another technique called Victorian flower beading which also uses seed beads and wire, but is done in a different way. I hadn't heard of that before. You can find a short comparison of the two here.
Do you want to see my first attempt now? Hey, I even used my bead spinner for the first time! The beads I used are a mix of a sky blue and a silver lined blue. I'll need thicker wire now to give it a serious try and then we will see where this will be leading me.
What have the other JAC members learned in this new year? Have a look! I'll add links as they come in or I'll just show you pictures!
Jewelry Art by Dawn
You don't know what a Swabian is? Swabians come from the Southwest of Germany. We have our own dialect and of course we have been stereotyped. We are stubborn and narrow-minded, we are thrifty to the extent of being stingy, and all we know is how to work.
What used to be a joke, often is praise today. We keep our money together, know how to work hard and have entrepreneurial qualities. I think that as always the truth is somewhere in between and of course changes over the years.
I am stubborn for example, but I'm not stingy.
And still ... I just can't that let that "thread on the other side of the loom" go to waste. I'm too stingy for that.
I don't own an adjustable loom. If I have a piece that is too wide for the small loom, but not really long enough for the wider loom, what am I supposed to do with that thread on the other side? So this is what I spontaneously came up with in the middle of one night using the thread on the loom and the beads already on hand. It didn't go as quickly as it may seem to you because I had to sew all the threads in, but I think it's an idea I can have some more fun with.
I have made another pendant since, but can't show that as it will be a gift. Let's just say I am working on refining this style a bit within the limits of such a small piece.
It's available in my Zibbet shop now and I am pretty sure it won't be the last.
P.S. If you want to know a bit more about Swabia, have a look here.
Although I have never been to Oxford myself - only to Cambridge - I have enjoyed watching two crimes series taking place there, the second series being a spinoff of the first one.
Today I'm going to cheat a bit. The quote is from one episode, yes, one of my favorite episodes in fact, but it's more than that. It's the oath that people who wanted to use the famous Bodleian Library had to take before being allowed to do so. External readers who are not attached to the University still have to recite this oath which of course used to be in Latin.
Being a librarian I couldn't but wonder if that would work here as well ...
"I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark,
deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object
belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library or
kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I
promise to obey all rules of the Library."
Lewis, UK, 2007 - 2013
P.S. I just read there are rumors there will be a new season after all. I'm officially excited now!
I'm sorry for being late today, but it's not easy to resist a sleep in after a long trash horror movie night, is it?
Although I'm very tempted to give you a quote from the hilariously BAD movies - oh yes, in bold, bold letters - I'm going to contain myself.
So instead of sharks I'll give you drag queens today. So much more stylish, especially when they find the great 60s outfits in the attic of the store in the little village they got stranded in when their car broke down. Can you say mod? My Barbie collector heart is beating like crazy in this scene.
"Oh, Miss Clara, we're gonna make you look like Emma Peel!"
Not just Miss Clara ....
To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar, USA, 1995
Last time I told you the reason why HeatherCats have no whiskers and promised to tell you about Grouchycat's yellow bird and more next time.
If you have seen Heather's cat paintings, for example on Shadowness, you may wonder why I feel the need at all to change something. Believe me, I try to stay as close to her paintings because that's just the way I feel about it. Unfortunately the beads don't always agree, though.
I never tire to say that Heather knows about these changes. I am not just running wild with her creations.
Let's take a look at the Tinycat in a Box for example.
When Heather started the Tinycat series, this is what she wrote "I got a little book of watercolour card, it has 15 pages and I'm going to fill it with tiny cats".
A cuff is not tiny. It's long, and more often than not long into the wrong direction. It wouldn't have made sense to turn the cat and its box around, though. So I dragged the design out a bit by making the window bigger and moving it over. I also cut off part of the floor and added the box corner as an extension instead.
This is the Silhouette Cat. As you see at first glance, I cut it on both sides, I left out the dark circles and took one circle off the moon. Instead I added the dangling tail. Why?
I felt that a pendant with this image would be great, but not everyone likes big pendants. To do Heather's cats justice, I need a certain space to put them on. The more complicated the painting, the bigger the piece will have to be to transfer it into a "bead painting". If I can cut something off to make the rest of that "bead painting" look better, so be it ... although it sometimes hurts a bit to do so.
The good thing is, though, I'll always be able to make another variation, like an SLN or a cuff maybe!
Now why the tail? Ok, I admit it, I love to make extensions, they are that little extra. As a crazy cat lady, how could I leave the tail out here? ;-)
Changing a tabby into a tortie?? Now that's taking it a bit too far, isn't it? You have no idea how I have struggled to make this a wearable pendant with the tabby on it, but the details were just too much. Maybe you already noticed that I usually (not always) leave out the black outlines. They simply take up precious bead space. Now imagine this tabby without those outlines and keep in mind that beads don't make fine lines very well (remember the whiskers post). No matter how hard I tried, it looked like a two color blob with two small black blobs, so that's why I finally went for the tortie (or calico) look.
I want to try to even go farther with this kind of change, but that's for a different post.
The last one I want to talk about is my favorite so far, the Dark Cat.
Working with all these colors was just wow. I really wanted to keep as much of them as possible, but I still had to cut a bit off the sides. Again there are no black outlines, but I kept enough of the black to keep the idea.
In fact at first I thought - no, Heather and I thought - this design would look much wilder transferred into beads, and I guess we were both glad it was not!
Oh, and why is Grouchycat's annoying bird in my pendant yellow instead of purple? Very easy, the yellow made for better contrast!
