The recent ill health of Lori Anderson, creator of the Bead Soup Blog Party, has led to the second and third reveal dates being postponed for by a week. So yesterday the second reveal group unveiled their creations. My group—the third and final reveal group—will now post our blogs next Saturday 20th April.
I’m quite happy with the delay though, as I only got home from 2 weeks holidays last night and could definitely use the time to refine my photos and my blog post, and maybe even make another piece. So, if you haven’t already, and you have a spare day or three(!), go and have a look at the talent from the first and second reveals.
In the meantime, here are a couple of holiday snaps for you! And I’ll see you back here next week …
I’m posting this from sunny, still summery Perth, where I’m holidaying with family for the next couple of weeks. But as yesterday was the first reveal of Bead Soup Blog Party 7 I thought I’d update on my progress! I have been very busy creating with the wonderful soup that Jane Pranata Lim sent me, and so far I have made 8 pieces. I would have made 2-3 more, but I have run out of 2 ingredients, and they will have to wait now until after my BSBP reveal date.
Here’s a sneak peek of one of my creations! I love this Lego-ised photo!
I am in the third reveal group and I will show you all what I made on 13 April. In the meantime, why don’t you go and browse through the first group of 161 jewellery designers, who have showcased their beautiful creations today! Visit the Bead Soup Blog Party blog for all links here.
I’m a bit late posting this, as it’s almost the end of the month, but between work, kids and trying to get ready for two weeks’ holidays on the other side of the country, I just haven’t had time to show you the pieces I made for the Art Bead Scene March Challenge.
This month’s inspiration picture is gorgeous, full of lovely rich jewel-toned colours. It’s a painting called Deer in the Forest by Expressionist painter Franz Marc. Here’s the painting, along with the colour palette created by Brandi Hussey.
Deer In the Forest, 1911 Marc Franz Oil on Canvas, 100.97 x 104.78 cm Philips Collection, Washington DC, USA Palette by Brandi Hussey
When I saw this painting I thought immediately of a lovely set of lampworked glass beads I have that were made by a fellow Australian, Liz DeLuca. They are large bicones in a deep purple and red combo with a smattering of silver along the edge. I combined them with Czech glass ovals in green with a brownish streak though them and antique brass findings and chain in a simple wire-wrapped necklace.
I used two of the big lampworked beads to make a striking pair of earrings too, with a tiny Czech glass rondelle in green on each side.
I’m taking part in Lisa Lodge’s My Bead Table II Sand and Sea Blog Hop. Lisa is a jewellery designer and occasional purveyor of bead mixes, and every now and then she throws out a challenge sending out interesting bead kits to inspire us all.
In this challenge, Lisa made two bead mixes, a Sand kit comprising beads and components in tans, creams, orange and brown tones, and a Sea kit of blues, greens, and purple tones. I received a Sand kit, with an interesting Greek ceramic focal bead, a handful of larger glass and stone beads, and a bead soup of tiny freshwater pearls, some larger glass pearls in champagne tones, green Czech glass rondelles, and a variety of tiny Czech glass and seed beads, along with a few gold toned beads, beadcaps and jumprings.
I had ideas to make a number of pieces from this soup, but in the end I only made one in time for the hop. There is a design in mind for the Greek ceramic focal, but I didn’t have the right coloured waxed linen cord and I didn’t have beads that I liked next to it. And I will use the two smaller oval beads and the larger oval pendant when the right beads come along as well.
So, with the bead soup, I made a necklace inspired by the colours of a very special place. I grew up in Western Australia, and my husband’s family still lives there. Every couple of years we head over in early autumn to holiday on Rottnest Island, which lies about 20km off the coast of WA’s capital city Perth. It’s a fantastic place to unwind, as there is really not much you can do other than go to the beach, and if you feel energetic enough, go for a bike ride. Needless to say, the beaches are spectacular, with white sand, rocky outcrags, dull green vegetation on the dunes and water in colours ranging from a pale greeny-blue at the edge to a deep azure blue further out.
Little Salmon Bay, Rottnest Island (photographed by Matthew Dry)
This necklace is strung on a greeny-blue ribbon to represent the junction between the water and the sea. A couple of nugget-shaped orange and green beads from my stash cap the ends of three braided strands of bead soup. Unusually for me, I used the gold-toned beads from the soup—I’m not usually one for gold-toned jewellery, but it worked well with this colour palette.
Please visit the other bloggers taking part in this blog hop!
About a month ago, Erin Prais-Hintz announced her latest quarterly design challenge—The Challenge of Music. I love doing Erin’s challenges, so I signed up straight away! And like all of them, this one has a little twist. The music used to inspire our creations had to be instrumental, with no words to influence our designs.
In Erin’s words:
Find a piece of instrumental music that speaks to your soul. The goal is to find a piece of music without any choral accompaniment, so that you have the freedom to interpret the colors, textures, shapes, movements and images that it evokes. YOU get to tell the story!
Create something of your choice – jewelry, accessory or some other artistic representation – that takes us on the journey of this piece of music. I am opening this challenge up to any artistic interpretation. Whatever way this music moves you, follow its lead!
Music has always been a part of my life, one way or another. My parents, my Dad in particular, are keen traditional jazz fans, and as a child I spent many hours sitting in dingy pubs listening to jazz bands (for some reason, Saturday and Sunday afternoons were prime time for jazz band gigs) and playing with the straw in my glass of red cordial. At age 9 I started learning to play classical guitar and performed in numerous performances and competitions until I reached the last couple of years of high school. I spent many, many nights in my 20s and early 30s going to see bands in venues ranging from sticky-carpeted pubs to gigantic football stadiums, and the radio is rarely off in my car.
When I started thinking about which pieces of instrumental music might inspire me, jazz was the first to come to mind, after all it is music I have been listening to for my whole life! And of the myriad of instrumental jazz tunes I have heard over the years, catchy little ragtime numbers kept popping into my head.
According to Wikipedia, ragtime was an early form of jazz:
Ragtime (alternatively spelled rag-time) is a musical genre that enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or “ragged,” rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of African American communities in St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published as popular sheet music for piano. Ernest Hogan was an innovator and key pioneer who helped develop the musical genre. Hogan is also credited for coining the term Ragtime. Ragtime was also a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa, with additional polyrhythms coming from African music. The ragtime composer Scott Joplin became famous through the publication in 1899 of the “Maple Leaf Rag” and a string of ragtime hits that followed, although he was later forgotten by all but a small, dedicated community of ragtime aficionados until the major ragtime revival in the early 1970s. For at least 12 years after its publication, the “Maple Leaf Rag” heavily influenced subsequent ragtime composers with its melody lines, harmonic progressions or metric patterns.
One of my favourite rags is the Maple Leaf Rag, that first hit ragtime tune.
This video uses a recording of a pianola roll, apparently one of seven recorded by the composer Scott Joplin himself (you can hear it skipping and speeding up here and there, a captured slice of musical history). Late last year I heard the tune played by a student at my daughter’s end of year piano concert and it’s been dancing in and out of my head ever since. It’s a bouncy, happy piece of music, makes me think of bright colours, women and men kicking up their heels in jewel-toned dresses and black and white tuxedos (although since this tune would have been played in dance halls as the 19th century became the 20th, I’m not sure that my mental image is particularly accurate!).
The other thing that strikes me about this music is its structure, which holds the tune together amid all of the wild syncopation. Ragtime music tends to follow a specific pattern with distinct repeated themes. Again, Wikipedia explains it better than me:
Original ragtime pieces usually contain several distinct themes, four being the most common number. These themes were typically 16 bars, each theme divided into periods of four four-bar phrases and arranged in patterns of repeats and reprises. Typical patterns were AABBACCC′, AABBACCDD and AABBCCA, with the first two strains in the tonic key and the following strains in the subdominant. Sometimes rags would include introductions of four bars or bridges, between themes, of anywhere between four and 24 bars.
So we have bright, happy colours and a repeating structure—in the case of the Maple Leaf Rag, the structure of repeats is AABBACCDD. I spent a long time browsing through my stash of beads, looking for the right combination of colours and shapes. In the end, I designed a necklace with 4 different sections, repeated in almost the same pattern as the song. Three of my sections are semi-precious gemstones (rose quartz ovals, dyed blue agate rondelles and dyed greenish-yellow jade flat rounds) with tiny brass spacers between each stone to represent the steady beat underlying the syncopation, while the fourth is a fancy brass chain. I added an extra section of chain—my designated A section—to balance the necklace a bit more, as I couldn’t get it to work asymmetrically (and in truth, one version of the rag I heard had a slightly different structure, with an extra AB on the end).
Now that you’ve seen my creation and heard about its musical inspiration, please take some time to visit the other bloggers in this hop!
I got a lovely parcel in the mail today—my Bead Soup for the 7th Bead Soup Blog Party—all the way from Indonesia. It was left by the door while I was dropping the kids off at school and daycare, so I had a lovely quiet house to unwrap it, oohing and aahing to myself as I took photos.
My partner, Jane Pranata Lim, lives in Jakarta, Indonesia. She sent me a wonderful selection of Indonesian goodies, and a few bits and pieces she made herself as well. It all arrived in a batik-patterned box.
First of all, the focals. Not just one, but three! The most amazing is a wooden batik mask pendant. Then there is also a heart shaped pendant with batik motifs. And a stainless steel pendant of a “gunungan”—a symbolic representation of an ancient tree motif. Alongside the three focals above is a piece of pretty batik fabric wrapped by Jane with copper wire. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll use this as part of a bracelet or in a necklace, it could go either way.
The clasp is something I believe that Jane made herself, a copper toggle clasp. I can’t believe it though, I missed taking a photo of the clasp! I’ll take one tomorrow and edit this post, as I really want to get it out there tonight.
And then there are the beads! A selection of different shapes of wooden beads with batik patterns. And a long strand of Java Gudo beads, glass beads from Indonesian bead shop Manik Jawa, owned by another Indonesian bead souper, Lili Krist.
I am really looking forward to working with this bead soup! I love the colours, so different to my normal selection, but so vibrant and exciting! The mask is fantastic, and I’ll write more about the mask style in a later post. Funnily enough, I have always had a thing for masks, and over the years I have collected quite a few of them, from Indonesia, from Venice, from New Orleans, although I don’t have them displayed right now. Thank you Jane!
Now, would you like to see what I sent Jane? She has received her soup now, so I can show you:
I built this soup around the “Bollywood Daisy” toggle clasp and matching connector, which was made by Queensland-based ceramic bead-maker Natalie Fletcher-Jones (Peruzi). I added a polymer clay pendant focal made by Barbara Bechtel (Second Surf Studio), which was the perfect shade of yellow, and a second clasp in bright brass as well as a few tiny brass leaves. And I completed the soup with a selection of colourful beads in coordinating colours. Clockwise from the top left are flat rectangular Czech glass beads in white, purple and yellow, then some smooth organic nuggets of West German glass in yellow and purple, a selection of Czech glass faceted rounds and smooth drops in amethyst lustre, a strand of tiny Czech glass rounds in amethyst shades, and in the bottom left is a mixture of glass beads (might be Czech but I’m not sure) in yellow, purple, green, pink and blue. Finally, I wrapped the package with a length of green sari silk (not shown).
Jane and I will be unveiling our creations on 13 April, so make sure you come back to have a look at what I make then!
You might remember me saying something last year about making more of an effort to sell my jewellery. Up until now, I’ve only sold a few pieces, largely to family and friends. Last year I took part in a little craft market at my kids’ school, but at that market I mostly sold jewellery to little girls.
Well, at the end of January, I applied to a local handmade craft market called The Handmade Show, and last weekend I was notified that my application was approved for the three dates I requested, in April, June and August. It’s a small market, run by artists, and doesn’t cost a lot to participate. And it’s literally around the corner, I can even walk there!
So now, I need to put my head down and try to make as much jewellery as I can for the next few weeks, as I will be away on holidays for a couple of weeks prior to the show. I just hope that what I like to make is something that people want to buy!
I’ll have more details on the show in a few weeks. In the meantime, I’ll be madly making new stock, finishing off a couple or three challenge pieces, and putting together a nice display. Any tips from the veterans appreciated!
I have made a personal goal for myself to try to complete a piece for the Art Bead Scene monthly challenge at least every couple of months this year. February’s challenge is based on Heijinja, a woodblock print by the Japanese artist Toshi Yoshida (1911-1995), which features a striking red building, surrounded by softer colours in the blossom-laden tree, the people, birds and so on.
Art Bead Scene colour guru Brandi Hussey pulled out a palette from the print, which features that striking red, plus the softer shades of pinks, peaches, greys.
Heijinja, 1941
Tōshi Yoshida
Woodblock Print
(Please note this art is copyrighted and is to be used only as inspiration.)
I recently acquired a flower pendant from Australian ceramic artist Natalie Fletcher-Jones (Peruzi) in a shade close to that vibrant deep red colour. I paired it with Czech glass rondelles and rounds in muted shades of red, brown and that denim-y blue seen in the palette above, strung onto a denim blue waxed linen cord and gunmetal chain. A simple pair of earrings in the same colours are also knotted onto waxed linen.
A couple of weeks ago, I signed up for the biggest jewellery making blog hop of the year—Lori Anderson ‘s 7th Bead Soup Blog Party! It’s my second time taking part … click here if you want to see what I made in BSBP6!
The premise of BSBP is to swap a carefully thought out bead soup with your assigned partner, including at least one focal bead and a clasp, which must be used in the resulting piece(s). On the reveal date, everyone blogs about the soup they received, and the pieces of jewellery they made. This time, like last time, there are 3 reveal dates spread over three weekends—with more than 500 participants overall, I’ll be visiting blogs for weeks! I’m in the third group, and will be unveiling my creations on 13 April.
Early last week, I was assigned my partner, and we sent our soups off to each other .
This time around I am swapping with Jane Pranata Lim, of Cherry Eve Jewelry, a beader who lives in Jakarta, Indonesia. Jane, who is a graphic designer and mum to a 2 year old, in addition to jewellery designer, works mostly with wire, seed beads and cabochons. Jane’s blog Cherry Eve Corner shows some really beautiful wire-wrapped and beaded pieces! I’m really looking forward to seeing what she sends me.
As for what I sent Jane, here’s a sneak peek! I can tell you there are a couple of main colours featured and the clasp is quite special!
Come back in a week or two, to see what we sent each other.
Today is the reveal day for Tracy Statler’s Wellness Words jewellery challenge and blog hop.
In Tracy’s words:
Choose an inspirational word or phrase in an area of your life where you want to make positive change. Make sure your words truly represent something you want to work on. Don’t choose a word because it looks good, is popular right now or someone else thinks you should choose it.
Incorporate your words into your design. It does not have to be complicated. Perhaps simple is better. That way you may want to wear your jewelry more often so you can be reminded of your words and focus on the healthy change part of this challenge.
My word is a word I keep coming back to:
BALANCE
My life at the moment is not balanced. I have three children ranging in age from 3 to 7. The two girls are have just gone back to school, my little boy starts kindergarten (preschool) next week. I have a (very) part time job that I fit in around school drop offs and pick ups. Then there are after school activities like swimming, gymnastics, ballet, music practice and homework! I love to make jewellery, but that is usually relegated to the evenings and weekends, when I’m not running around to birthday parties and family gatherings. I spend too much time on the computer and not enough time doing things I need to do. I rarely get to bed before midnight, and I am usually up just after 7am, with at least one wake-up to kids in the middle of the night. I ended last year feeling absolutely exhausted. And now it’s all starting up again, with school starting back this week after the summer holidays.
So this is my year to work toward a more balanced life. I know that I won’t achieve everything, but some balance will not go astray. If nothing else I’d like to find a bit of time for me, to take a dance class, go for a walk, anything to make sure that doing the grocery shopping on my own isn’t the highlight of my week!
Enough about the why, let’s move on. I have been playing with clay with my Mum. A couple of weeks ago, we had a lovely day making pendants and stuff out of porcelain clay, including some (hopefully) great leaf-shaped bracelet connectors with my word stamped on them. Unfortunately they’re sitting in the kiln waiting to be bisque fired. So it was time for plan B. After thinking about what I could do with some metal blanks but no stamps, I decided to break out the polymer clay.
Here are the two bracelet connectors I made, using Premo, late last night (nothing like a deadline … thankfully it worked!). I highlighted the word with Vintaj patina ink in Cobalt as it was the only thing I could think of — most of the paints in our house are of the Crayola variety. They’re not super-clean but they have a certain appeal, I think!
I matched the connector to some sari silk from my stash, and added some elongated brass chain. It’s a very simple design, but that makes it more likely I’ll wear it!
I still plan to use the porcelain connectors once they are completed. I made several, so Mum and I will be able to play with different oxides and glazes. I promise I’ll show you what works!
Thanks Tracy, for making me think about what is important to me! And please hop over to some of the other blogs involved!
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