I vill bite you - The earrings

Remember that I said there will be something new from the bead soup?
I have been sorting and sorting - not done yet - and while I haven't got around to start on a re-make of the bracelet and choker yet, I have made two pairs of earrings, one for myself and one for sale.

I had to change the design a little bit for this smaller brick stitch version and I also used a different red to make them glow more.
What do you think?

Random Saturday - Soup memories

To me, spring cleaning doesn't necessarily mean pulling everything out of cupboards to put new lining in. Instead I am pulling tiny wire and thread bits out of beads, to be clearer, I am still in the process of ripping up old pieces.

Two of those were from my earliest days of bead looming, a choker and bracelet in the same design, vampire lips.

You could tell that I was still very much a newbie then. I still struggled with the right tension which made the pieces rather stiff, and in one of them I had used satin beads without knowing how easily they would cut through the thread I used.
The reasons to keep them both around for more than ten years were probably mostly sentimental, but it was also a reminder to pick the design up again eventually as an improved version.

Now the time seemed to be right to cut them up along with other old items on my list. Each time I had looked at them lying in my drawer, I had felt a pang of guilt that I hadn't made anything new yet.
Taking that into consideration, it was amazingly hard to cut them up. This large tube of bead soup - this bit is just part of it - is so much more than beads.

It's a beginner's journey to an own and original design, to trial and error and frustration (cue the satin beads again).
It's the joy of seeing a piece coming alive from a printed piece of paper after several hours.
It's the wish to share it with others to see if they also like it.
It's the memory of a personal disappointment.
It's the story of seeing your jewelry again and again, noticing every flaw and finally admitting to yourself that it needs a remake - and seeing it again and again and not getting yourself to actually do it.
And as the last step for now, it's the story of cutting it up and picking it apart - and thinking about what to do with this soup to honor the journey. So-to-speak.

I know it sounds terribly emotional, but I can assure you I didn't shed any tears.
It's just that I hadn't expected it to feel so different from the many other items I had ripped up over the years. Usually it's a relief, maybe with a bit of regret, this time it felt like setting myself a new task.
The old is gone, there will be something new, even if I can't say yet what it's going to be.

Would you have thought that someone could get so philosophical about bead soup on a Saturday night? ;-)

Rip it up - The painting

"Rip it" - use the components of a piece and make something new from it, that was the March/April challenge at the Jewelry Artisans Community.
I'm practically a professional rip upper. Up ripper? Jack the Ripper? You know what I mean. I could put on my shop sign "Ripping up since at least 2012". Because that's when I first wrote about ripping up stuff for a JAC blog carnival.
The other day a fellow jewelry maker asked how long others wait to rip up pieces or offer them at sale prices if they don't sell. For me, it often depends on
- how much I like a design - endlessly hoping it will find its person eventually
- on the materials and if I will be able to reuse or recycle them easily - I rip up fewer silver items than other things
- how difficult the ripping up will be - wire crochet or knit items with a bead in each stitch are the absolutely worst, but it's also no big fun to pick tiny thread bits out of beaded items.

Just like in 2012, my urge to rip something up usually comes over me like a sudden wave.
For the challenge, I had picked up two items, but both them were nothing but wire and pearls, and I didn't have an idea for just pearls. So I went wild and ripped up five items with stones instead, a Cantera opal, a small Boulder opal bead, two jasper cabochons, and a tumbled rock that I have fallen in love with many years ago.
Latter is the stone I want to show you today.

I don't know what kind of stone is, but to me it looks like a tiny impressionist landscape painting, a stormy sky over fields. So pretty.
I messed up royally.
My first mistake was to go for a wire wrapped bezel, a technique I had only just started and that I tried to make work on a very slippery rock, with wire just barely long enough. That led to mistake number 2, adding some "decorative" wire strands stabilizing the bezel and, frankly spoken, looking as if someone peeked at the landscape from behind very strange bars. The tiny dangle definitely couldn't save anything.
The pendant went on the "rip up" list pretty quickly.

This time around, I opted for bead embroidery. I had a leftover piece of beading foundation that looked like half a navette shape. Its center was just big enough for the rock.
My plan was a simple bezel and for the sides a few mookaite beads picking up the colors of the stone and flowing lines around them. I hated my first attempt. I didn't like the second attempt much better.
Ripping up a piece twice that was part of a ripping up challenge, oh, the irony!
I left the center with the stone, with a peyote bezel in metallic bronze, but the two sides had to go, snip snip.

That's when it hit me. I had a painting which needed a frame and nothing else. No flowing lines, no beads, nothing on the sides, nothing dangling from it.
Was it coincidence that the current episode of my favorite show about artisans was about a gilder working on an antique frame?
I read that impressionists would have preferred white frames for their work, but that collectors and museums wanted the valuable look of gilt frames.
To enhance the "old frame" feeling, I added an edging around the bezel using a mix of light and darker metallic bronze and gold.
Sorry, it's a very grey day, I still have to take better pictures.

If you have been wondering about the shape, by the way, you are right. The stone is not symmetrical as this picture of the back shows, it's more like a drop shape if you look at it vertically. So the pendant isn't symmetrical, either, but I think it still works.

And did I feel the urge to add dangles after all? Of course I did, it's not something I can just turn off. I just had to look at my little painting, though, and the urge went away.

So, what do you see?

Inspiration is everywhere - Donald Duck and the mirror earrings

The other day I really doubted myself. For years, I had had the plan to make a pair of earrings with little mirrors. My inspiration was a Donald Duck story about a Greek nymph who threw her hand mirror to the ground where it turned into a lake, and I also had the feeling that the story had been inspired by a real Greek tale.
I even started writing a blog post, but when I tried to find out more about the Greek tale, I came up empty. Next I tried to find something about the Donald story, but a site that a friend told me about didn't help me, either, because only titles were listed, no contents.
I questioned my family, but to no avail which was very disappointing ;-)

So now I had a pair of bead embroidered earrings in light blue (for the water), with small mirrors on top and sparkly crystals in the handle, and the story that inspired them didn't even exist?

It didn't even comfort me that I liked the result. Could I really be that wrong about something that had been taking up space in my brain for so long? I was sure I hadn't made that up myself.
Of course there was only one way to solve this problem, I had to look through my comic books.
I started with my "Walt Disneys Lustige Taschenbücher", translated "Walt Disney's Funny Pocketbooks", a comic book series that, other than the regular "Micky Maus", had around 250 pages and thus allowed for longer stories. They were published several times a year, not weekly like "Micky Maus", and with very few exceptions, the stories were by European artists, mostly Italian in the early years, in fact they were based on the Italian series "I Classici di Walt Disney". For economic reasons, the early books weren't fully colored, but the double pages were alternatedly black-white and colored.
The LTB as they are called here had many ups and downs regarding the quality of the stories - both the drawing and the writing - but I grew up on them; and although they can't compare with the work of Carl Barks, there are a few wonderful adventures in them.

And .... "Auf den Spuren der alten Griechen" (In the tracks of the ancient Greeks),
LTB 32 "Donald im Glück" (Donald in Luck)!
More like "Cat in Luck"! I didn't have to search as long as I had feared.
I had never looked for Greeks on the aforementioned site because I was so fixed on the mirror part or I may even have been quicker.

So, was the story based on a Greek tale?
Kind of. Actually it mixed up two Greek tales, added a detail of its own and threw in an Italian adventurer for good measure.
Tale 1: Deucalion and Pyrrha survive a flood sent by Zeus as a punishment thanks to being warned by Prometheus, Deucalion's father (they didn't take any animals, shame on them, Gundel and der Dekan said). When they ask the goddess Themis how to repopulate the world, she tells them to cover their heads and throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders, meaning Gaia, the mother of all living things, her bones being rocks. The rocks thrown by Deucalion turn into men, those thrown by Pyrrha into women. Again, it doesn't say anything about cat..., erm, animals.
Tale 2: Castalia, a nymph, tried to evade Apollo's amorous advances, and threw or transformed herself into a spring near Delphi.

In the story that Huey, Dewey, and Louie tell Scrooge and Donald, Deucalion and Pyrrha don't ask Themis for advice, but the gods in general. Next, the nymph Castalia appears. She throws her mirror to the ground and it turns into a mirror-shaped spring (not a lake, mea culpa) and advises the couple to throw Gaia's bones over their shoulders when the light of the full moon falls on the spring.
To get a free vacation to Greece, Donald convinces Scrooge to search for the spring and use it to turn stones into gold, and when they come to Greece and Donald finds an antique mirror in a shop, he sneaks it into the fire, determined to blame the mirror's age when the spell won't work.
Of course the nephews notice right away that the mirror is from glass and can't possible be as old as the tale, but Scrooge tries his luck, anyway.
Instead of being turned into gold, however, the rock gets duplicated. The nephews look the mirror up in their trusted scout guidebook and find out that Cagliostro, an Italian adventurer and "magician", invented this magic mirror.
Finally the mirror breaks and the pieces produce a crowd of Scrooge duplicates who chase after Donald, a spell that lasts for an hour.

There you go. What you never wanted to learn, I got it for you :-D
Oh yeah, and earrings.

All the Ducks belong to the Walt Disney Company. I am not affiliated with Disney in any way.

Clumsy Saturday

It's one of those days. Actually, it has been one of those weeks. If this keeps going, I'll probably get eaten by my cats tomorrow.

That's why I can only share two pairs of earrings that I made this weekend. The third pair is unfinished yet because I cut my index finger like an idiot, and now I have to move my hand at an awkward angle if I try to bead which makes my wrist hurt which then makes my elbow hurt - long story cut short, I gave up for now.
It has been fun digging through my bead stash, I hadn't done that for a while. I think there will be more variations of these earrings once my finger is up to it again!

Moonlight ravens

I love pretty much all animals, but have always had an extra soft spot for black ones - and yes, der Dekan knows, but he has a healthy image of his gorgeousness, so he doesn't mind.
Ravens are among those black animals, and on a trip to London (too long ago), one of the highlights for me was visiting the Tower and seeing the famous ravens.

It's not the first time for me to put a raven into one of my designs. I gave my Poe pendant a raven charm I made from polymer clay, and I created a large raven necklace.
This time it's a pair of big bead embroidered earrings on stainless steel earwires.
These two ravens have already settled on their favorite branches for a good night's rest, full moon and stars above them.
I just can't resist a night scene!

Vampire Bat Angie

I have to admit it to myself, I am not very good with jewelry at the moment. There's a pair of earrings in my drawer that is only waiting for me to decide on earwires. There are also a few small beaded hearts in a baggie waiting to be used in something. I keep picking things up and putting them down again.

Feeling so little motivation right now has a lot to do with what's going on, in the big world and in my small world.
Luckily that doesn't seem to mean that I can't get creative at all. My muse obviously thought that it was about time for me to work on a doll design that - together with two others - has been on my table for months now. This time I actually doodled a sketch of three outfits (during a meeting when I wasn't needed) that had already been in my head even months before that, more to remind me than to follow them in detail.
My doll outfits develop during the process, and not even I can tell what they are going to look like in the end.

For this one, I used an Angie doll for the very first time, a lovely Topper brunette with the head mold P10.
Her hair color doomed her to become the bat lady. You may remember that I have become quite fascinated with bead embroidery wings (ooh, just had an idea for another design), and I definitely saw Angie mostly in black with bat wings. If I still rerooted heads, I might even have been tempted to give her black hair. And call her Angelina for a more romantic vampire name.

The first decision was about the dress being tight or an opulent ball gown style, the flowing nightgown style was out right from the start. One thought that popped into my head, probably because I had been watching old Addams Family episodes on YouTube, had been a dress like that of Morticia, but first, Morticia is not a vampire, and second, I want to make my own designs.
So the dress finally became tight, but there is no plunging neckline, no long sleeves - not only because they are difficult to make with beads as the arms are so close to the body, but because I wanted the contrast of the arms against the wings - and instead of the "tentacles" at the bottom the skirt flares out at a higher point and is a little longer at the back.

To sew crystals to part of the skirt, was a spontaneous decision. Black and siam red is a combo that is irresistible to me. Only when it got dark and I turned the light on, I noticed that I had used both dark and regular siam crystals. It's hard to believe as in these pictures the dark siam seems almost black, but in daylight you have to look very close to tell them apart if you use black thread. Luckily, I liked the effect of different "blood drops" and therefore just added a few more of the light siam crystals instead of ripping everything out.

As usual, I beaded and beaded on the dress until then it was almost too late to make the shoes. Will I ever learn?
Then I realized that I have never thought about vampires' shoes before. Ballerinas, high heels, slippers? I took the easy way out with some simple sandals because they aren't seen underneath the long dress, anyway. They have slim ankle straps, soles and two straps across the toes.

Much more interesting are the wings, at least to me.
I haven't succeeded in getting a good video (yet, I will keep trying) that shows the sparkle of the silver lined red bugle beads against the AB shimmer of the shiny black sequins.
I could have used matte black sequins or shiny ones without the AB finish, but I love the effect of black exploding into color with a small movement.

You know I love making accessories, but they wouldn't have worked in this case.
Angelina just got a small choker with a "vampire bite".

I am still contemplating either trying my hand on some red lips and vampire teeth for her myself or outsourcing the task to someone who's quite probably better at it.
Even that doesn't happen, however, I am really happy with my dark beauty!

Update April 2024:
I finally tried my hand at a vampire smile, but after many attempts, I gave up on the teeth because they didn't go together with the eyes, and I really didn't want to mess up the eyes. A wide smile didn't fit and just two white dots looked ridiculous, at least to me, as if she had crumbs on her mouth or something.
The red lips, however, work much better with her overall look than the pink ones did!

Angie and Dawn were registered trademarks of the Topper Company. I am not affiliated with Topper in any way.