Tattoo earrings, and fun with Patera

I made these earrings a couple of days ago and I really like them - they look adorable on. They are not all that long, but they swing around just enough, as far as I'm concerned. Enough to be a bit eye-catching, I guess you'd say, without being so big they bother me.

I'm having a terrible time getting decent pictures of any of my pendants, but here's one:

This is one of the first ones I did with diamond glaze. I like it despite its imperfections - the resin is wavy and dips in the middle and kind of slops over the edges a bit. But it still looks cute, and that's what matters, right? It's a little over an inch wide - I think it came on a fancier chain, actually, and I decided it was too formal for this piece and went with plain old bead chain. I'll use the fancy one for something else!

(Added: if you click on the link below the next picture, you can see what I was calling the "fancy" chain - the one with the sort of vine motif.)

This next one is an especially bad picture, so I apologize in advance, but at least you can see the pieces:

These are little earrings (only about 1/2" wide) that basically came pre-made - wires on them and all, I mean - so all you have to do is put some artwork in there and seal it up. This artwork came from paperwishes.com - they have some books of artwork especially for jewelry, called "Easy Peasy", which are made to go with Patera findings and/or memory glass. I've been wearing these a lot.

This one is imperfect (like all of them) but I like it anyway. It has some match artwork which I bought on Stampington's download page (here) and then I added some glitter and some little microbeads. The artwork got sort of obscured by everything else, but it still looks cute and you can still tell it's a bird so oh well.

(Photo backgrounds courtesy of my Claudine Hellmuth class - we're making a little chipboard book so I put it to work already.)

Patera pictures to come - and supply-collecting

It may be foolish of me to try to write an entry right now, when I'm operating on very, very little sleep, but I'm in the mood and I'm not always in the mood lately, so it seems best to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak. (In fact I'm not sure I've touched an iron since we moved a year and a half ago, but there is one around here somewhere, I do know that!)

I've made several pieces of jewelry lately - mostly with Patera findings, because I'm having fun experimenting with them. Most of them have come out quite decently, although just about every one has some flaw that makes it unsellable, at least to my mind. But not unwearable - so these are probably destined to become pieces I wear myself, or else gifts. What I haven't been doing lately is photographing anything, but I'm sure I'll get back to it eventually. I do want y'all to be able to see my little imperfect experiments with Diamond Glaze.

I've been gathering the supplies for the Claudine Hellmuth class (see sidebar for link), which starts next week. I ended up spending quite a lot of money on the search - although to be fair, not all of it is Claudine's fault. I am not good about sticking to a shopping list, and given an excuse to go in lots of craft stores, I am inevitably going to come out with things that have nothing whatsoever to do with Claudine's class. Like, for example, the new Industrial Chic line of jewelry findings that Michael's is selling. I haven't found a Michael's yet that has Claudine's line, although some of them are supposed to. But they all have Industrial Chic! I went to a couple of very large stores - the one on Bee Caves in Austin, and the one on Weslayan & Bissonet in Houston, as well as the also fairly large one in Pearland and the smallish one at Baybrook, and none of them had so much as a hint of Claudine's paints. So I don't know what "selected stores" means - they must be selecting ones in New York or California or someplace.

Part of the problem is that I am not an actual scrapbooker - I own some scrapbooking materials, mostly bought for other purposes. I do play around with card making and I seem to have acquired quite a little collection of rubber stamps lately, and of course I'm prone to buying anything at all that might be made to intersect with jewelry-making. Claudine's class is forcing me to buy things I hadn't gotten around to, like gesso and better-quality paint, and a brayer and other goodies which I really should have had already anyway.

Letter pendant

I got my order from Paper Wishes a couple of days ago, and prodded by that, I finally got around to trying the Amazing Glaze I bought from Ornamentea before Christmas. The result wasn't perfect but it came out pretty cute, so I'm happy with it as a first try!

The picture is a little out of focus but at least you can get the idea. This is a pendant made by Nunn Designs - it's heavier and deeper than a lot of the bezels you see, and I really like them. This piece is about 3/4" so it's small enough that you could put it on a charm bracelet, if you wanted, but I'm thinking I'm going to wear it as a pendant.

This is what I did: first I cut a piece of background paper and glued it into the bottom - but then I eventually covered that up completely and I don't think it ended up being visible at all. The initial is one of these - I glued it down, too, and then I put more glue on top and on the sides of the paper initial and poured some Delicas in (mostly brown with a few pale ones) and pushed them towards the outside edge. I didn't worry too much about which way the Delicas fell - some have the hole visible and some don't, I just tried to get them distributed more or less evenly around the edges. But I didn't try to make everything perfectly even, either. All of that moving stuff around, and the wetness from the glue, ended up distressing the initial a little bit, but that was fine with me. After I gave the glue a while to dry, I started pouring in Amazing Glaze - it's a powder, like really, really fine grains of sand. I baked it for about 10 minutes at 275F, until the powder had melted completely. (I didn't set the timer, I just checked it every couple of minutes.) The glaze wasn't deep enough on the first try, but I put more in and tried again, and second time I mounded it up a good bit and it came out just about even with the top of the bezel, once it was melted, and I decided that was fine. There's one tiny little bubble over the bottom of the letter but I can live with that. I probably wasn't careful enough with how I added things. Anyway, it's cute and it was awfully easy, so I call that a definite win!


(Looking at the website, apparently Nunn Designs is the same as what's called Patera jewelry - I wasn't sure.)

Ornamentea and steampunk

Remember back before Christmas when I said I was going to post pictures of the stuff I got from Ornamentea, and then I didn't? I never got around to taking the pictures at the time, but I finally did this week. I knew if I waited any longer it was going to get scattered all over the place.

Here is the contents of the Amazing Glaze kit:

Besides the jar of glaze itself (which is sort of a crystally powder) and the instructions, the kit had several bezels, the assorted colors of cord, and an assortment of stamps. After looking at the instructions, I have some fun ideas for what to do with this - some layered things with objects in them, maybe? We'll see what I come up with.

This next picture is part stuff from Ornamentea and part stuff from Loew's. I think you can guess which is which, really.

(Hint: the Ornamentea stuff is at the bottom.) The little round tin - which includes what seem to be shell casings - was the kit that came with a pre-order of the Steampunk book, and since the book has been released, I guess that means the little kit is no longer available. I really like the book, by the way. I was very impressed because a lot of people seem to use the term "steampunk" without really knowing what it means, and if you read through this book you'll come out of it with a pretty good idea, I think. Jean did her homework. (Which is what an author ought to do, yes, but unfortunately you can't always entirely count on it happening.) There's some great jewelry in here, but in between, there are short pieces about steampunk books - which is the original origin - as well as steampunk art, steampunk clothing, and more. It's really interesting, and I really think it's something that anybody trying to make anything that they're going to call steampunk ought to know.

I went to JoAnn's this week and bought alcohol ink, because I knew it was supposed to work on metal, and I got this idea that I would try to color the washers I bought at Loew's. I tried it last night, and the results so far are fairly encouraging, although I haven't taken pictures yet. (And actually the lid of the Amazing Glaze, seen in the picture above, got used as an experiment, too. It's no longer white!)

Links and pictures

I added some store links and links to magazines - I'll probably add some links to other weblogs, too, later on. For the online stores, I mostly stuck to ones I've ordered from myself and had good luck with - and the ones with locations after them are local stores that don't seem to sell online. I also added a bunch of books to my Amazon store, just for fun.

I did take pictures; here's some of my Hobby Lobby loot:

And here's some other stuff I've bought lately: resin beads from Natural Touch Beads and Happy Mango Beads (see sidebar for those links):

Here are some (not near all) of the leftovers from my skull necklace - I didn't end up using many charms because I decided I liked the way it looked without them. Plus, I just have way more stuff than will fit on one necklace, period. Obviously there's going to have to be a series!

Some of these came from Bead Boutique and I think some from one of Nomadic Notions' San Antonio stores. Quite a few of the others I bought on Etsy. I also have tons of other skull beads left over, which I didn't try to put in the picture.

I would post the picture of my finished necklace but I'm not really happy with the picture; besides, I changed it after I took the picture. So I'll post a new one later. (If you can't stand the suspense and want to see, the ones I have are on flickr.)