Gimp

So I fell down the stairs three weeks ago and hurt my feet - I know I'm darn lucky I didn't actually break something, like my head - but my feet are still achy enough that I skipped the quilt show this year and I'm still aggravated about that. I was intending to go right up until the last minute, but I finally decided that it was a bad, bad idea, given the amount of walking involved, and I think that was the right decision but I'm also still sorry I missed it. I'll get over it eventually. I was actually intending to take some pictures this year too. (The background there is that I used to take LOTS of pictures at the quilt show - as in hundreds - and the last couple of years I went cold-turkey and didn't take any. So there's a history with me and the quilt show pictures.)

There has actually been a bit of crafty stuff going on around here, off and on - for one thing I went to my first-ever Stampin' Up demo, and enjoyed it immensely. So I will probably be going to some more of those. I've also started making a new set of (smaller) jump-rings for my Scrap Box Bracelet, so that I'll actually wear it, hopefully, and then I'm also working on an advent calendar. I found a board one that looks more or less like this (assembled but completely unfinished) at a craft store. I bought it a couple of months ago, and I'm not actually sure which store I bought it at, either JoAnn's or Hobby Lobby, I think. I'm currently planning on finishing it fairly plainly, at least for this year. I've been putting gesso on it and I might put a layer of paint on top of that, and then I'm just going to put colored numbers (probably printed out from the printer) on it and stop, for now. Next year I might do those cute things with the paper cut out to fit the box-fronts and such, but this year I'll do good to get numbers on the thing. And soon - very soon - I've got to start working on the Christmas gifts that I promised to make.

Scrap Box Bracelet

Here is a partial shot of the bracelet I made in my BeadFest Texas class:

The class was excellent, and I actually got my bracelet finished, which is amazing (although I may go back and redo the jump-rings, because while they look great, they are a little large for normal use. By which I mostly mean that they seem prone to catch on things.) Anyway, I duly pounded on metal and used various kinds of rivets and cold connections, and I am very happy and tired and I enjoyed my class immensely. Kim St. Jean was the teacher; she has a book coming out after Christmas, I believe they said.

(I'm not kidding about being tired. I hope this is moderately coherent.)

Kim's book:
Mixed Metal Mania: Solder, rivet, hammer, and wire exceptional jewelry


(Or you can also order it from her website, I believe: http://kimstjean.com/ )

BeadFest Texas

Anybody want to come take a class at Bead Fest Texas with me? They opened up registration, and I decided on a whim to take "Scrap Box Bracelet" which is a full-day class on October 2nd. It's expensive but it includes almost all of the materials, so that helps. Here's the sample bracelet:

I've been meaning to learn cold connections and that kind of thing, anyway. Plus I like the bracelet.

I'm just going up by myself, unless I find somebody else who wants to go. (Which is not my way of saying "poor little me" - I don't mind going by myself. I'm kind of independent that way. But I'd love to meet up with other people who are going!)

The Awards

I can never resist getting snarky about Oscar dresses, so I wrote this up and since it has a good bit about jewelry in it, I'm putting it here for your consumption. You can play along by looking at this slideshow, which are the same pictures I was looking at when I wrote this. Be sure to notice that if you hover over those pictures there are additional little "detail" pictures of jewelry and bags. One thing is very obvious with the jewelry, and that's that the usual big flashy necklaces are conspicuously absent this year. (Hmm, you think this means the whole "statement necklace" trend is over?)

Here's my little mini-rant, before we start: I'm soooo sick of strapless dresses. Do something different, people. Plus a lot of them are unflattering or just plain ugly, although the ones this year were not as bad as some previous years have been, on that score.

OK, starting here with the slideshow:

1. Cameron Diaz - this is beautiful, actually, and I'm not usually much of a fan of hers. Strapless aside, I like it. I do agree with whoever said she looks like Generic Hollywood Blonde, though. (Barbie Goes to the Oscars, maybe?)

2. Sandra Bullock - it looks pretty good in this picture, but I mostly didn't think it looked that good live. (Hey, it's not strapless, though!) The tissue skirt looked like aluminum foil a lot of the time. I tell you when it looked really beautiful, though, was in the long shot where she was sitting in her aisle seat and the skirt was arranged all pretty to the side. That one time, it looked really great.

3. J-Lo - this one was the opposite, it looked really pretty on the red carpet when she was swishing the skirt around. (Big swishy skirts had to be the #1 trend this year.) I do hate that foldy thing on the front, though.

4. Demi Moore - I really like this one a lot. Another strapless that works. I like the color on her, I like her hair, I even like the wrapped mummy effect at the top and the cascading ruffles at the bottom. When I describe it, like that, it sounds awful. But it just all works. (Added: the Fug Girls point out that it is rather seriously too tight across the top. But I didn't even notice that until they said it.)

5. Penelope Cruz - I like everything about this except the neckline. I like the color, the drapery, all that stuff. The bustline just looks weird, though.

6. Kate Winslet - I don't love this. It's sort of overly restrained. Too tailored-looking for my taste, I guess. Maybe it's supposed to just be a background for that necklace, which I do like. (I didn't even notice it at first, actually.)

7. Kristin Stewart. Hmm. Don't like her hair, love the navy, and at least her strapless fits. There's something funny-looking about this dress that I can't quite put my finger on. I love the trumpet part at the bottom - other than that, meh.

8. Sarah Jessica Parker - horrid all the way around. Wow, sort of breathtakingly horrible, actually. (And this is Chanel? Really?) And that color wouldn't flatter her even if the rest of the dress looked better.

9. Nicole Richie. Well, it's not a strapless, that's for sure, but ugh, just the same.

10. Miley Cyrus - it's not horrible on a SJP scale, but it kinda looks like she went out in her underwear. Be sure and look at her jewelry, though - that cuff in particular is beautiful. Bracelets seem to have replaced the big necklaces as the jewelry of choice this year.

I snagged a screenshot of her hand:

11. Zoe Saldana - I want to see what the Fug Girls had to say about this (see link at bottom), because it's certainly ripe for mockery. It did look sorta pretty swishing around onstage, though.

12. Diane Kruger - I usually think she looks great, but that black stuff looks oddly like it's some sort of goth tinsel or something.

13. Rachel McAdams - I have decided that Rachel McAdams is one of those chameleon-ish actors - she just looks utterly different every time I see her. I can't quite get over the stage where I'm going, Really? This is Rachel McAdams? (Or else maybe I'm getting her mixed up with somebody else, I don't know.) But really I like this dress a lot. It's pretty. I don't think those earrings go well with it, though.

14. Carey Mulligan - this looks too much like a prom dress. (Cute shoes.)

15. Anna Kendrick - the overall effect is really similar to Demi Moore - that is, the color (more or less) and the hair. These pale colors would wash out a blonde too much, but I think both these brunettes carry it off. The dress itself is pretty, except that that slit at the bottom ruins the line of it somehow.

16. Maggie Gyllenhaal - first of all, the description calls this "avant-garde", to which I say, I'm not seeing what's so avant-garde about it. I don't really like it, but not because it's so out there or anything, I just don't. What I can see of that jet thing in her hair looks pretty, though.

17. Vera Farmiga - I love you, Vera, but I hate this dress. Now this, I would call kind of out there. Pretty color, other than that, awful. It's, I don't know, an explosion in the ruffle factory or something.

18. Amanda Seyfried - I don't love it. This is the very pale person who is washed out by the pale dress. Those chocolate-diamond bracelets are kind of pretty, though.

19. Elizabeth Banks - I like the color, don't love the rest of it. (The text calls this gray, but it looks blue-gray to me. Which I like. I might have to go look at some other pictures of it.)

20. Mariah Carey - prom dress

21. Julianne Moore - another one who can't carry off the pale color. Maybe because she's a redhead? I'm not sure.

(As for the Fug Girls - here's a link to a lot of their Oscar snark, which I had not read until after I wrote the above. The Zoe comment is particularly hilarious. And they didn't like Kate's dress either, although they did like Vera's.)

Things that might be for sale

I have four, count 'em, four Etsy items up now. I don't know why that makes me feel so much more like I have a legitimate store than I did a couple of days ago when there were only two items, but it does. I have a 5th item (the onyx wirework piece) ready to go as soon as I can get decent pictures of it. I think I'm going to have to have daylight - the onyx is so reflective that photographing under Ott-lights like I've been doing just doesn't work well at all. You get a piece of onyx and the reflection of the light bulb - it's very odd-looking. Here's an example:

 

(That's actually the back.) Come to think of it, I guess item #6 (the aqua beaded necklace) will be ready to go as soon as I find or make some copper jumprings and make an extender for it - right now it's not quite 16" and that's too short. And actually I was thinking about putting the bracelet I made in my last class up, too - I don't think I've posted a picture of that one yet:

So that would make 7 items. (I think I need to start putting one of those "your monitor settings may vary" disclaimers on my listings, because it's so darn hard to get colors right. I don't know that these colors are wrong, but the green beads look a lot more neon-green here than I think they are in real life.) Although I haven't quite decided about the bracelet, for sure. I'm waffling.

What I was doing in March

Journal entry from March 7:

I took a jewelry class this week. I only got one pair of earrings (out of four) actually finished in the class, because I was sort of slow getting the hang of the technique, but I finally did, more or less, and I can now actually make wrapped loops. Which is something I've been meaning to learn for ages. So yay me.

Here are the three pairs of earrings I eventually got finished. The fourth pair was a chandelier with Swarovski bicones, and I was having trouble with them - like I said, I had a little trouble getting the hang of wrapped loops. I worked and worked on them, and finally I thought, "I don't really even want these earrings, why am I beating myself up over this?" And I took them apart and used the bicones on something else. I have the chandelier findings and I'll probably re-make the earrings eventually, but I don't wear chandeliers - I prefer just straight dangles or drops like the ones above - so they will probably end up as a gift for somebody. (Or you may see them in my Etsy store, even!)

I had signed up for two classes at the same time - that was the first one, above, and the second one was a peyote class. Now, as I think I have already noted somewhere below, I don't really do seed beads, normally, but I thought it wasn't a bad idea to know the theory. But I actually ended up making 2 peyote pieces, although the first one never quite got finished. That was this:

These are hex beads in sort of an iris color. I got this piece long enough to do a bracelet - which is what it's supposed to be - and then I decided it was really wider than I wanted for myself, and I made another one that was only 4 beads wide instead of 6:

And I did finish this one, as you can see, and I have worn it quite a lot all this year. (It actually has a little stripe woven into it, but it just really doesn't show up in most kinds of light. Every once in a while I'll see a little flash of it, but mostly not!)


And I will finish up by showing you another, non-class-related, bracelet that I made around the same time. It's kyanite coins from Magpie Gemstones, and it's actually one of my favorite things I've ever made, because these are just gorgeous stones.

(I also put my very favorite toggle on it, which I think came from the now-departed Bead Connection.)

My fun 2008

Here's some more of the jewelry I was making last year:

The earrings at the top are aquamarines - somewhat mismatched, as you can see - and the bracelet and watch are glass. I seem to have been on a blue and green kick last year. (I love blue and green; I always use them a lot, but it does seem like I was using them an awful lot at this time.)

So. When you look at my Livejournal for last year, there's this big gap in my jewelry-talk for several months. There's a lot of talking about other things, but very little about jewelry. And that's because, as I mentioned before, there was this storm. (Ike, I mean.) The somewhat-shortened version is this: we decided at the very last minute to evacuate. We spent a few days at my aunt's house and then figured out that we weren't going to be able to get home or go back to work for at least a week or so, and we took off on a big road-trip to visit my husband's parents in Ohio. (We hauled nearly all my beads all the way there, too, jumbled up with a lot of other stuff in the back of Rob's Toyota.) The only other bead-related thing, while we were being displaced persons, was that while we were in Ohio, my friend Karen and I decided to meet up, and since she lives in the Detroit area, we decided on Toledo as a good sort-of-halfway meeting point. And since I had mentioned bead stores, she found one for us to visit - it turned out to be Meant To Bead, which is an awesome shop. If you're ever in Toledo, I highly recommend it. I know I bought a number of things there, but the one that I have photographic evidence of is this string of Czech glass rondelles (which, as you can see, got made into a bracelet later):

I love those colors and I never would have thought of putting the purple in there, but it really works.

Well, so anyway - back to the story - we got home, eventually, and we found a wet apartment and a landlord telling us that everybody who lived on the first floor had to move out so they could gut the whole floor (I think they had to go right down to the beams) and start from scratch. I don't really think it was liveable, anyway, but obviously we had a bad scramble for a while trying to get a new place and get moved and clean up the old place. And of course we also had to figure out how much of our stuff was salvageable, which luckily was quite a lot. There wasn't nearly as much water in our area as there was in other parts of town - the FEMA guy who looked at it said he thought it was about a foot, although there wasn't a really clear waterline.

So we found an apartment on the mainland and we got moved; my husband said he didn't want to live in Galveston and risk having to go through that again someday, although he has relented a bit on that recently. Meanwhile, we also had to go back to work. We both worked for the university medical center, which had been heavily damaged - Rob went back to work more or less as normal, but my office was in a building that wasn't habitable, and so we went into temporary quarters for a while, and then we worked at home for a while, and then in November the shoe dropped, and half my office was laid off, including me. Rob's job was ok, although his job duties were shuffled around a bit in this same process. I decided, after some flailing around about it, that I wasn't going to look for another job as a secretary, and I have been a student all this year, studying medical coding, and I should be done in a couple of months. Luckily our financial situation was such that I could do this. So while I have not done a huge amount of jewelry-making over the past year (I always feel like I ought to be studying!), my jewelry-making story does pick up again at the end of last year. And I'll cover that part later!

To sell or not to sell

More of my first flurry of jewelry-making, from back in the dawn of 2008:

I made some more jewelry, but you may be happy to hear that I haven't taken any pictures yet! The latest is a silver(-colored) bracelet made out of these beads. (That site calls those beads spacers, but I made a whole bracelet out of them anyway - I did stick little teeny saucer spacers in between them, but that's it.) It came out really cute - I'm wearing it at this very moment. Actually I was rather pleased with myself because I didn't have a toggle closure that matched the beads at all, and then I had a silver lobster claw that would do, but nothing to fasten it to, and I made my own little split-ring connector to fasten the lobster claw to. It's the first time I've tried that, but it came out okay. It works, anyway, and it doesn't look bad at all.

Then the next day, this:

As I have said, I started making jewelry mostly so I could make it for myself, but I took this to a new height this morning - I actually made a pair of earrings to match my outfit. I put on a turquoise-colored shirt, and then I put on the bracelet that Rob gave me for Valentine's, which is turquoise enamel and silver, and then I thought, "I don't have any earrings that match!" I had already made one pair of turquoise-colored earrings, but they had antique-gold findings so they wouldn't do. But I had a couple more of the Czech glass beads that were the right color and in less than 10 minutes I had a silver pair, too. Luckily I was running early, for once.

I did find that bracelet that Rob gave me - I had a whole little bowl full of stretchy bracelets, and it was in there. It's cute - it's alternating squares of silver and turquoise enamel. Rob always picks out pretty cute jewelry, left to himself. (Usually when he picks out a gift for me, it's either jewelry or a DVD of some movie he knows I liked a lot. And sometimes flowers. I have a nice husband!)

Then a couple of weeks later, this longish bit - which is all jewelry-related so I'm going to give you the whole thing.

Wanna know why I am getting so much into jewelry? It's all Elise's fault. God, I love that necklace. I want to be able to make something like that someday. (And I also would like to be able to sell things that cost $700 and change, incidentally!)

I had a watchface I hadn't made up my mind what to do with, so I made a watchband out of jet beads for that, finally - which I keep forgetting to take pictures of - and last night I made two more bracelets and some earrings. My sister thinks that we should try to get accepted to sell at the Nutcracker Market this fall (big, big gift show held in Houston every November) so obviously I need to get to work. I'm watching very closely about what items I wear that people admire, and so forth. Doing something big like Nutcracker Market is going to be scary when I'm not entirely sure what's going to sell. I really think the little short dangly earrings that I've been making out of Czech beads will sell well to that sort of crowd, though. I guess I just need to make a lot of those in wintry colors and cross my fingers. (Which is not to say that that's all I will make, anyway. I will try out a number of things.)

Incidentally, I was telling my friend Col about my watch with the jet beads and we ended up discussing the Wikipedia entry on jet. (Jet is actually a petrified wood - sort of similar in composition to high-grade coal, oddly.) We is geeks.

Speaking of geeky, I am fascinated by stuff like this: Dino-Era Feathers Found Encased in Amber

Here's the watch, although I noted later that these beads were not actually jet:

I still really like it, jet or not - I had it on today, as a matter of fact.

My sister never did sign us up for the Nutcracker Market, for which I am profoundly thankful. I think it would have been far more stress than I could bear. I had just started making jewelry, for goodness sake - I think it would have been premature to try to sell to an market like that one.

More blasts from the past

Here's another early piece of jewelry, and an LJ entry I wrote in Feb. 2008. (And ooh, the pictures copy right over - that'll make doing this much easier!) The bracelet isn't anything spectacular and neither is the entry, but I'm just trying to get all my meanderings about jewelry over here in one place.

I made another little bracelet Friday night:



It looks better in person than in this small picture, particularly. These are some of the garnets from the beads-of-the-month package - there were some more, better-quality ones this same size but I'm saving the rest of them for later. The rest of it is just random spacers, but I think it looks nice and it fits my wrist perfectly and I really love it.

I also made some more bracelets and a pair of leaf earrings that I have on right now and I really like a lot. I will have to see if I can figure out what kind of beads the leaves are - they look like glass and I'm pretty sure they came from a Fire Mountain Gems order several years ago. (Fire Mountain Gems used to have a fairly large minimum order policy, as I understand it, so back when I was crazy quilting several of us did a big order and split it up. And that's where the leaf beads came from. They are the oddities in that set of beads because almost everything else is very small beads. Like, everything else is 4-6mm and these are 20.)

As I said, I've been picking up beads here and there for a number of years, so now that I'm using them I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out what some things are in order to find more of them. I just looked, for example, for those leaf beads on Fire Mountain's site and I don't see them, even after paging though all 700 listings for "leaf". I also had a couple of strands of little 4mm beads that are sort of a dark pearlescent color, and I made a two-strand bracelet with them that I like - but again, no idea what they're called or where I got them.

More old entries

I posted in the last entry about the first jewelry class I took, in 2007. That was right after my mother died - I think I was trying to distract myself - and after that I got busy being an an executor and fun stuff like that, and didn't make anything else for a long time. It was 2008 before I started again and here's the next thing I made:



I had already bought those beads somewhere along the line - I guess I would call them "art glass" nowadays but I didn't really know at the time what they were, I just thought they were pretty!

You can also see the progress of my jewelry photography techniques, such as they are. This one was taken on the cushion of the (now-lost) swivel chair that I inherited from my mom. It also came out pretty well, considering.

Here's part of the entry that went with the picture:

Rob bought me a really pretty bracelet for Valentine's and all I could think was that I wanted to take it apart and use the clasp. I seem to be hooked. And incidentally, it may seem like I started talking about this out of the blue, a bit, but it's been coming on for a while. I've been playing around and buying bits and pieces of stuff and trying to put together earrings and so forth occasionally for 5 years or more and just never quite got going, too much. And I took the beading class nearly a year ago, and I believe I did mention a while back that I signed up for elisem*'s bead of the month thing (aka botmo*) this year, too, and that's just getting started this month. So I've been sneaking around doing pieces of this in a stealthy way for ages.

Hmm. I'm gonna have to go look around in my jewelry and see if I can find this bracelet Rob gave me, because I don't remember right now what it looked like. Our life has been turned upside down between then and now but surely it's around here someplace. (Up until Ike, we used to live in Galveston, in a first-floor apartment right behind the Seawall. Now we live further inland. This is also the reason I don't have my mother's chair that I mentioned above. It wasn't actually lost per se, it was just covered with mold by the time we attempted to retrieve it. I'm sure I will fill in further backstory as we go but since that's already come up twice, obviously that bit of story needs to be filled in now!)

I should probably also mention that I posted the link to my Livejournal before, but if you wander over there you will not necessarily be able to find all the entries that I'm quoting; that's because I have a paranoid streak and I restrict a lot of my Livejournal posts to friends only. I used to lock anything where I talked about work, for example - that's one reason why I've posted on Livejournal for so many years, because it allows me to post privately about things I wouldn't feel comfortable saying in a public post. But I am trying to get over that!

Big apatite

My intent was to post all the pretty things I found here, but I haven't done too well so far. I love this one, though.

Apatite gemstone bracelet from expressionsbyerica, on Etsy.