Copper is not new to the Jewelry Artisans Community Oldies but Goodies Challenge, in fact it's the third time for it to make its appearance which is no wonder. After all copper is no new material in jewelry design. Often jewelry artisans start out using copper because it is more affordable than silver and fall in love with its warm look that is so beautiful with a lot of colors. A red or green combined with copper for example will have a completely different look than combined with silver. To be frank, I have always considered myself to be a silver or white gold girl. Actually I started out making jewelry with coated copper wire if I wanted a bit of color, but also sterling and then fine silver. At some point that turned around, I felt the beauty of copper creeping up on me. Maybe I felt it worked better for what I did than silver, maybe I was inspired by the beautiful copper pieces I kept seeing from others, at any case my feelings from when I kept getting a dark wrist from the only copper bangle I ever owned as a teenager had changed completely. Today's selection shows I'm not alone with this feeling about copper. Enjoy.
This week's Jewelry Artisans Community Oldies but Goodies Challenge was easy peasy. Or was it? The topic was Black AND Blue, not Black OR Blue, but we were lucky, it didn't mean that other colors in the piece were not allowed. Black and blue is actually a pretty cool color combination as you can see looking at the entries, and maybe I should use this as an inspiration. I'm thinking of bead looming here .... For now, however, I have this collage of fabulous pieces for you. Once again it was very hard to choose!
What is there to say about this week's Jewelry Artisans Community Oldies but Goodies Challenge? I think the title speaks for itself ... festive colors. Although I like to say that black is my favorite color - yes, I know it's not really a color - we all need some color in our lives, maybe even more these days. I hope you'll enjoy today's selection (and please click the picture for more detail)!
Some
years ago when I still did the "Finds of the week" posts, I had some
called "I'm a collector" in which I shared vintage items.Over
time my collections have mostly stopped growing due to different
reasons, but they are still there and still loved. I also have vintage
items, some inherited, some gifts, some from fleamarkets, some more
interesting than others.So I thought it could be fun to share some of them every, now and then and tell their story.
This time I want to show you two very old friends of mine. The brass horse and baby elephant belonged to my grandmother. I remember playing with them as a child. In my imagination the little elephant was an orphan that had been adopted by the horse. I would let them walk all over my grandmother's place - which wasn't that big, mind you - and when they took a break, the baby would drink milk from the horse. Don't ask me why, I was the kid that used the little playing cards at my other grandparents' house like dolls, making them have conversations and go out (I loved the way the pictures looked). I had a lot of imagination and was able to play like that for hours sometimes.
Unfortunately they are not marked. I know they are not Walter Bosse because the style is more realistic. It just surprises me that so far I haven't been able to find them elsewhere or at least something in the same style because I'm convinced these figurines were just as popular in the 50s as the wonderfully whimsical Bosse pieces. Here's a cat that has to work hard in my kitchen holding towels and potholders, I think he's still surprised about that job ;-)
At a fleamarket about ten years ago I did find this cat. I suspect she is younger than my old friends because its surface looks rougher, but I fell in love with her elegant posture and the price was very sensible. As you can see she is much bigger than horse and elephant, too, so I don't display them together. She usually has the job of holding my two wonderful memory necklaces of Merlin and Meffi, painted by my friend Dawn, while horse and elephant protect part of my personal library, safely behind glass.
Some time before my grandmother passed, she gave me the little elephant. A while later I saw the horse standing on my younger brother's book shelf. I couldn't bear to see them apart and practically begged him to give it to me. Luckily he not only had no sentimental connection to it at all, unlike myself, he also wasn't at an age to be interested in a figure like that. No worries, he still hasn't regretted giving it up ;-) Whenever I see those two together now, I'm immediately taken back in time to my grandmother's flat. I see her TV chair, her record player, the table cloth with the tassels (something else I loved to play with), and the cupboard where they used to wait for me to take them down and play with them.
Lately I have been working on making more earrings. You know I sometimes struggle making the same thing twice, so this is not always easy for me. When going through my lampwork stash in search of inspiration again, however, I found these beautiful drop headpins on sterling silver by Iced Moments. The easiest way to use them is just bending the silver into earwires, I "made" a pair of earrings for myself that way. For these I wanted a little more, though not too much to keep the drops the main attraction. In my crystal stash I still have some 2 mm crystals, and these three colors - a sapphire blue and a grey and light blue in kind of an opalite shimmer - seemed to be perfect for the earrings, so I wrapped them on using a fine sterling silver wire. Just a pair of my handmade earwires and there you go. It doesn't always need much.
Do you have a favorite pattern? I remember a great pair of capri pants with wide blue and wide stripes back in the 80s. I loved that one so much! Or the finely striped jeans in grey and black, one pair in the 80s, the other one in the 90s, I miss both of them! Or that plaid skirt - not missing that one so much. I never was into flowers for myself that much either, but that early 80s wide dress in a light plaid was very pretty. I never wore "punk plaid", though, or the then fashionable "carrot pants" in a tartan pattern. Of course there is much more out there than only flowers, stripes or plaid, though, they were just the first ones that came to my mind. You want proof? Just check out this collage from the latest Jewelry Artisans Community Oldies but Goodies Challenge where we did patterns this time. As always I'd like to encourage you to visit the original thread as well because one collage simply isn't enough to show it all!
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.
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! ;-)
