September 23, 2006
Ok, this inspires major desire. When I am not broke, I swear, I’m on this.
Look at the loveliness.
In unrelated news: to all the lovely people who have ever left comments here and thought you were being dissed by my non-replies.
I don’t know what magic setting was preventing me from commenting on my own damn blog in the past. And I am too proud, you see, too proud to admit, on my own blog, that I have not been able to subdue the stupid wordpress thing that lets me comment.
So today I try it, thinking what the hey, and lo and behold “test.” Fully expecting nothing. Having done nothing, or if I did I don’t know what, to make this work and fix this bug.
So to all commenters: thank you, merci, gracias. And now you may see that it takes a WP bug to shut me up.
September 13, 2006
Forgive my absence. I have been really busy lately, a lot of it Jewelry related. Much as I love being an Etsy seller, I’ve been working on building my own web shop - it just seems an appropriate step to take, and I am my own code monkey, so there’s really no sitting back and hiring someone to do the work. It’s going to look great though.
Saturday night was my opening at Outsiders and Others gallery. Here are a couple of photos from the opening. There’s a good deal of really nice work down there. My favorites were Nate Nolting’s silkscreened items, including silkcreeen on vinyl records - a nice use of the round format.
(yours truly and some beady favorites at the show)
The opening was really a blast. It’s my first participation in a gallery with any of my jewelry. I’ve been in juried shows with some of my prints and drawings in the past, but this was really nice validation for this jewelry. I’m looking forward to doing more of this.
August 28, 2006
And beads.
Apparently “Pavlova” has snagged a third place ribbon at the Minnesota State fair. I’m very stoked. At third I’m sandwiched between two fairly prominent names in the bead world - names people would recognize from the book sections at the bead stores.
I’ve been playing with floral motifs and pieces which take more time.
I got completely cleaned out at the Bobby Bead 40 percent off sale, but while I have empty pockets now I do also have giant pink moonstone chunks aplenty. I think I used only a third of what I have for this piece.
I’m also going to be in a show at Outsiders and Others gallery. They are doing a show of craft. More details to follow, but the opening is on the evening of September 9th.
August 23, 2006
Sometimes it all goes very quickly and you can just knock a nice one out. The clasp on this is a truly vintage button, probably chinese cloisoinne from the 30’s. I can’t believe I actually used it on my jewelry, but I guess at least it has a function again. And I think the red catches the red in the bead strands really nicely.
I had fun doing the freeform netting around the cheap plastic face button. What a mix of high and low materials - I guess that last post I had about the vindication of plastic flowers is a barometer of where I’m at. I bought a whole mess of 50’s-70’s plastic gunk to play with and work into my jewelry. I guess I’m tempted to just be a hypocrite about my base metal allergies for a little while.
Maybe this will feed into the next bead-a-long challenge, hmm.
August 21, 2006
Plastic flowers vindicated.
In other news, I have three lucky winners of beaded rings and have alerted them. However, the giveaways continue - this time I will be giving away one of my patchwork cuffs, the last week in August. How can you be eligible? Sign up for my mailing list using the form at the right sidebar. There, that was easy, wasn’t it? I won’t fill your inbox and I won’t do anything nefarious with your address, just good clean fun.
I landed a whole bunch of vintage sequins this weekend at the Sound Unseen design market, which I never would have known about save for one post on craftster. If they do it again next year I may volunteer just to make sure this thing gets a little promotion, eek.
August 18, 2006
I am doing the mailing list ring drawing today — if you have not signed up for my mailing list yet, now’s the chance to be entereed in a drawing for one of 3 beadwoven rings for FREE.
I’ve hauled out the Viking. It belonged to my MIL, who passed away, sadly. There’s a huge amount of her energy tied up in this thing and it IS a wonderful machine. As wonderful as a sewing machine can be - I’m convinced that if men were the majority users of home sewing machines there is NO WAY the technology would suck as much. Seriously, it’s very frustrating.
I’ve never machine sewed anything before. I never had the patience to fight the unthreading and evil of the machines
- be kind. These are my first items, and I don’t think they’re half bad. I wore one out to the bead store last night, where I’ve worn my jewelry umpteen times to no comment and the girl at the register was like “oh CUTE, did you make that?” Yes. Yes I did.
What I realized is that I can be really patient, but I need rewards, I need instant gratification. My lap quilt project was doomed because I need to build an attention span. It was like learning to knit by making a scarf, rather than learning to knit by making a small felted purse that comes out all crooked, but doesn’t show your dropped stitches because it’s felted and still works as a purse, and you made it in 8 hours!
August 14, 2006
I have a couple of parts done, moving towards a pretty major piece. The first pic is the focal, the second is one side, so I have pretty much one more side to go and then I have to figure out the catch.
I have my scanner/printer hooked up at last, yay! So pretty soon you’ll be subjected to my illustration as well as my beads. I’m having a crisis of “voice” though, which has essentially been one of my problems throughout the whole time I’ve been making things - I have trouble finding a unified way of working.
I don’t know how important that really is though - almost every time someone brings up the issue, they are really trying to talk about marketing more than art.
August 13, 2006
I’ve been throwing myself into some knitting, and a major bead project, which I’ll post progress on shortly. I’m trying to give myself some time to do some more fine-craft oriented beading - not that I don’t enjoy more production and wearing-oriented jewelry, but I don’t want to neglect the things that really challenge my technique.
Here’s me going scarflet crazy - such fun. I can’t wait to wear these if nobody starts buying ‘em. They’re all on Etsy until I decide otherwise.
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August 11, 2006
Making this was really fun. Bead embroidered pendant on peyote tube.
August 10, 2006
This is the most interesting art tool I’ve come across in a few weeks. Courtesy of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.
http://oblique-strategies.dougstewart.org/
2 Comments | Categories: Uncategorized(t) , Etsy(t) , art(t) , stuff I love(t) | Autor: redthreadarts
