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.