Recent Work

I promised more photos of things I've been creating recently, so here you are.

I made the flower piece on this necklace a whole year ago when I took a jewelry class with a local jeweler called Lyn Stoll. She taught us how to cut a shape out of a solid sheet of copper. I drew this flower, traced it onto a manila folder for a thicker pattern, then traced that onto the copper with a stylus. I used a little baby hand-saw and really, really tiny saw blades to cut this out. It took a long time. Then, Lyn gave us each bags of cedar wood chips, to which we added ammonia at home, kept our copper pieces in a sunny windowsill for a week, and voila! when I took it out, it was this lovely shade of green. After that, I was hooked on patinas, but not having a lot of extra cedar wood chips laying around, I decided to just order the patinas I mentioned in Monday's post and let someone else do the chemical mixing for me. Anyway, I hadn't gotten around to sealing this piece until recently, and this is what I came up with. I added a delicate raw brass chain and some faceted garnets. I'm not sure if I'm quite happy with it yet, though. I think it still needs tweaking.

The centerpiece of this one is a silver-plated and rhinestone piece my friend Dani gave me when we did our girls' day and clothes swap not long ago; SCORE!

I found these beautiful Martha Stewart silk ribbons at Michael's not long ago, and I've been incorporating them into some of my pieces to soften them up lately. I really like the way they've turned out. The one on this necklace is a lovely light beige, like tea and cream.

I've also been loving very large cameo pieces lately. I call this one "French Countryside."

Most of these are destined for either Art Trail in April or the Funky Finds Spring Fling. I've got to find some time to make some dedicated pieces for my Etsy shop!