Is This Art?

Yep. I think it IS art. Beautiful art. Just not my art which, sadly, seems to be on hiatus. But before I wail about artist's block, I should report I am having a great, creative time over on my other blog. My vintage doll play is taking up my free time of late, and seriously cutting into my reading, painting, jewelry-making and everything else-time.

However, I did have time to finally get bitten by the Troll bead bug--probably the last person on the planet to experience that, or so it feels.

It started a month or so ago with the three glass beads in the middle of the brown bracelet. There are a couple silver Troll fillers there also. Actually, it started earlier that same week when I discovered a bead store at my local mall which sells lampwork Troll knock-offs on the cheap. I didn't plan to go All Troll when I bought them; I planned to make something with them. But, as a victim of a classic successful cross-over retail strategy, I happened on to authentic Troll beads and chains and clasps at my local greenhouse, when I went in for crossover Vera Bradley.

Like a sensible (crazy?) shopper, I left the Vera there and came home with the start of my first Troll bracelet. While at the greenhouse, I discovered they also had already-strung Troll knock-off bracelets, too. Knowing I could cut that bracelet apart with my jewelry tools at home. I bought a brown knock-off to fill up the brown bracelet I had just (seconds ago) started. It is in the top photo.

Since I still had knock-off beads and parts leftover, and came across some more imposters at the local Jo-Ann's, I now had the beginnings of both a pink and a beach-y themed bracelet. Conveniently, said smart greenhouse was having a Troll bead trunk show, and there I got one turquoise with lime dots Troll bead as well as a silver crab, and another knock-off (beach-y theme) bracelet to take apart.

Throw in a trip to Brighton in the mall, where their beads are just as cute and some definitely cuter and cheaper, and here I am with my mini-collection of three very different Troll bracelets. I wear one nearly everyday. Do you have a Troll bracelet? Or Pandora, Camellia (sp?), Brighton or? Is it a work of art?

Charmed, I'm Sure

I remain crazy as ever about charm bracelets and am glad other people share my enthusiasm! One of my favorite co-workers, Ms. Caroline, asked me to make up some charm bracelets for her daughter, future daughter-in-law and of course, herself. The requests were black and white and beach-y, turquoises and beach-y and antique brass and neutral for Caroline--who has the tiniest wrist ever--5 3/8"!

You can click on each photo above for a larger view. The squares at the top are actually blue and green mother-of-pearl, a lime-y sort of green, although they look yellow in the picture. Ick. There's some actual turquoise and other natural elements as well as a glass fish and many fun charms.

The antique brass bracelet has brown pearls, brown mother-of-pearl, wood beads, foiled or dichroic beads, resin flowers, picture jasper and lots of brass findings. That's jewelry-speak for "metal accents." The adjustable chain clasp has a brass filigree dragonfly and crystal accent.

The black and white bracelet has some vintage buttons as well as big black and white lace-y glass beads, black and white swirl mother-of-pearl, pearls in silver bead cages, nautical charms and a nautical lobster-style clasp. That's also jewelry-speak for a claw-type clasp that actually has nothing to do per se with the nautical theme, except that this one is shaped like a buouy.

I love making each charm and dangle. They are always so hard to part with. Every time I make a bracelet for someone else, I tell myself I will make one just like it. But I never seen to get around to it. At least I have my pictures to remind myself in case I ever do.

Still Nesting

I finished a couple more projects into the wee hours of Saturday night, or I guess that would actually be the wee hours this morning. I had been saving this last nest, a nice nosegay shape, for quite some time, along with the pearl clusters, which had been part of a ponytail holder. Together with the vintage millinery leaves, old button and piece of a doily, it just seemed to say "wedding." I still have a few more finishing touches to add.

The baby shoe is another one of my pin cushions. I love finding baby shoes at an antique mall, so I can alter them up in some way. It seems nice to preserve something so significant. I always feel sad when I see them for sale, instead of handed down generation to generation. And since I have no plans to alter my children's baby shoes, or my own, it's fun to dress up these vintage finds.

I also made a wire-wrapped primary color bracelet just for fun, with beads I found on a recent trip to Pittsburgh. Not sure if the bracelet will be for me or will go to my Etsy shop, but that moment of reflection seems to be required for everything I make. I always want to keep everything, but that just isn't sensible, considering the amount of stuff I make, as evidenced by this post and the one immediately below.

Lastly, I added some new charms to my most recent "artsy" charm bracelet. The original charms were ones I received at Art and Soul, Portland, in 2008. The newest charms (the ones on the top row), were received in the recent Cloth Paper Scissors magazine charm swap (the geisha, the nicho, the brown clay with turquoise string and the wrapped sheet music). The "Blue Willow"-like teacup is from my art friend Constanza, who is downsizing for an apartment and has tons of cool stuff for sale in her Etsy shop. The leaf and the Art in Ashland charm are from a swap with another art friend, Michelle Geller of Hold Dear. I love my charm bracelets! Every one of them, and every charm, has a story.

I feel a little guilty spending so much time inside--in the basement no less-- making art on beautiful summer days. But, weekends are my only art time, and at 90+ degrees and humid, I don't necessarily think of that as a beautiful summer day--especially when I can see my next-door neighbors enjoying their in-ground swimming pool--while my pool-sized back yard looks like a pool-less football field full of dead or dying grass, shriveling in the heat.

So off to the basement I go. Time to pick up where I left off at midnight. Oh, but if you think I went to bed when the clock struck twelve, silly you. From midnight to 3 a.m. I worked on my novel. I'm 16,000+ words in and feeling good. Please stop by my writing blog. It could use some visitors! Sneak peek of chapter one is way down the road, but it will be there. Sometime.

Still beading away, a little collage and Georgia O'Keeffe

I am in love with the earthy colors of this latest bracelet I put together tonight. It's a really unusual mix- sort of burnt umber, burnt sienna, magenta, browns, coppers and some animal print. It has a nest, birds, leaves and beads of glass, resin, pewter, ceramic and lampwork. I don't want to love it too much, though, because I really want to sell it.

The coral and silver bracelet has some really great findings, especially some lacey bead caps on the tiniest bits of coral. This one is just waiting for me to string up the turquoise table-cut beads and then assemble the whole thing. The beads look like Chiclets to me: a gum I used to obsess about. I've also always been partial to turquoise and coral when they are done up like this- in an Indian or southwest/cowgirl style. Oh-oh, another bracelet trying to talk its way into my jewelry box.

I'm pretty sure after that one, I am done with jewelry-making for awhile. I've pretty much exhausted my stash of beads and findings, so I need to make some more mad money!

The collage above is part of an 8.5 x 11 inch collage I started last year. I thought it was finished once, but I found some more great ephemera to add to it. I still haven't figured out if it is done yet, or what it means, since I've never seen any of those sites.

Speaking of southwest, I did some interesting reading today about the great American painter Georgia O'Keeffe and her husband, the great photographer, Arthur Stieglitz. O'Keeffe is known for her paintings of the flora and fauna of the southwest, but Stieglitz is best known for his nude photographs of O'Keeffe. When one pictures O'Keeffe we probably think of her in her later years- small, gray, wrinkled, weather-beaten, sort of an artistic version of Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies. But O'Keeffe was aparently quite the sensual creature in her earlier years, becoming Stieglitz's muse and most important influence.

I was doing a little refresher because there is an O'Keeffee exhibit in Kalamazoo until Sept. 13 that I would like to see: Georgia O'Keeffe and her times: American Modernism along with Through the Photographer's Lens: O'Keeffe and her circle. You can find more about it at the Kalamazoo Art Institute here. And thanks to Joanne Thieme-Huffman for the heads up.

What I've Still Been Up To

I've been making jewelry- frantically it seems- until 2 a.m. Friday, 3:3o a.m. Saturday and for eight hours straight on Sunday- 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. without a lunch break. I'll even accept the title frantic or manic, because it does seem when I get "on a roll" as they say, time just flies, to use even more euphemisms, and I don't even want to stop.

It's almost therapeutic, I think, to express myself this way. It bewilders even me sometimes. Some of these beads I bought more than a year ago, and just simply have stared at them ever since, unable to make anything happen. I'd string some up and then cut them back apart because I didn't like what I had created. And now, all of a sudden, everything looks good to me, makes sense, matches, falls into place. My wire-wrapping and bead-crimping skills seem to have returned.

The only thing on my mind when I am spending so much time making jewelry is that I'd also like to be painting, drawing, writing, making collages and altered art assemblages. In fact, I even keep an art 'to-do' list. I don't like to have "works in progress" as I mentioned some time ago. It's just not my style to have several things (or even two) going at once. It bugs me. I like to finish one thing at a time, although I will admit to having another afghan about half done. But, I really have to take breaks from crocheting or my golfer's elbow comes back. It happened once before- lower than tennis elbow and aggravated from repetitive motion- like crocheting.

So, what's on my to-do list? I have two 10 x 10 canvasses and some paint and colors in mind for some impressionistic painting, a la Ceza'nne for a Somerset challenge. I have some weird parts gathered up for an Alice in Wonderland challenge. I want to make a little robot out of scrap parts. I have a couple doll heads waiting for bodies out of bird cages or bottles. I have an Americana canvas I want to paint. I have a project on "colors" that I want to do. I have some rusty numbers I want to use. I want to do some more rubber-stamping and card-making to submit. I have a nicho I want to fill. I have at least one more charm bracelet in mind, and I just accepted an invitation to a Marie Antoinette charm swap and maybe a fabric journal page swap. I have a poem about escalators in my head and a short story about waking up at Teesha Moore's fun house in my pajamas. I have a novel started (okay, so that's a major WIP). I have five short stories that need edited and sent out. I want to make some more sugar skull ATCs. And I do want to finish that afghan. Nevermind about a full-time job and sending a child to college. Weeds to pull? What weeds? Girls just wanna have fun and do art.

I attended a nice little wedding this weekend in Michigan in the midst of all this creating. Congratulations to my co-workers Amy & Brian who are on their way to an Alaskan cruise now, via Vancouver.

Where's all this jewelry going? Not sure, but definitely for sale soon. Happy creating. How great to live in a free America where we can be as creative as we want, whenever, however we want.

Time for the Big Reveal; My Relationship with Art and Other Dramas

The Marie canvas of which I posted a sneak peek here, left Indiana for sunny California and recipient Kathy Jacobson a few days ago, so hopefully it is safe to post the finished piece now. This was my canvas in Maria Rodarte's "Marie Bits & Baubles Swap." The idea was to use an 8.5" x 11" canvas and create 12 different sections, although it was completely open to interpretation. I used a bit larger canvas and there are 12 sections, although irregular in size.

There's a pocket wherein I stuck a Marie-inspired tag, an artist trading card and some Marie ephemera. I also love the old glass bottle in the lower right corner. I wired it on to make it a vase. The turquoise pin is a brooch I bought a few years ago and seldom wore. There's vintage millinery from an old hat I took apart (the turquoise velvet leaves and buds), a ceramic bird, lace, ribbons and lots of great stuff. It was fun to make!

But that was last weekend's work. This weekend started on Friday when I got some great beads half price at my LBS: Bead Source in Fort Wayne, IN., which has been in business well over 10 years. I went for pink and that's what I got. In fact I had this bracelet in my head, and spent several hours last night making the various dangles, then cutting and wire wrapping them, and then attaching them with jump rings to the bracelet. There are more than 25 different stacked dangles with glass and resin beads, vintage buttons, sterling and other metal bits, crochet beads amd ceramic beads from Earthenwood Studio. I can't decide if I will sell it or keep it, but if I sell, you can always find it in my Etsy shop!

I also stopped by my LSS: Stamping Day and Night in Fort Wayne, to pick up the latest Catch Up magazine from Stamper's Sampler and while I was there sweet Sarah showed me a new old technique which uses alcohol inks and blending solution on glossy paper to make some cool backgrounds. I couldn't wait to try that either, so sometime after midnight I let my tired jewelry-making eyes play around with that. I'll cut these examples up for backgrounds for greeting cards or artist trading cards (ATCs).

At the bookstore I got two exciting books, Journal Bliss by Violette and Painting with Watercolor, Pen and Ink by Claudia Nice. The journaling book is just a RIOT of color, and I couldn't wait to start doodling, so in the wee hours, when I had finally settled into bed- sort of- I started doodling faces in my sketchbook. Can't wait to play with that later today!

Meanwhile, after getting to sleep at 4 a.m., I somehow sprung up at 8:30 (yes, a.m.) to go buy flowers and plants. Although we had sleet, snow and hail in northern Indiana just Tuesday, we have now had two (count 'em, two) days in a row of sunshine and 80F degrees. There's definitely an Indiana (and maybe even a redneck) joke in there somewhere about planting too soon, but I just couldn't stand it another minute. Everything was looking so bare, plain, ugly, drab, blah, you get the picture.

So I loaded my little car at Wal-Mart, Lowe's and the local greenhouse and came home with a huge fern, a couple of hanging plants, filler plants, geraniums, pansies, and dirt as well as a dozen solar lights for the landscaping after running into an acquaintance who said the $2.99 lights work like they cost a million bucks. At dark, we'll see. If they do work, I have a feeling I'll be making a return trip. With a graduation open house looming, 'sprucing up' takes on a meaning of astronomical proportions. And since it is only April 25, this won't be the first year I'll probably be dragging plants in and out of the garage each day, to protect them at night.

One of my purchases was a real pineapple plant, with the cutest pineapple ever growing on it! Photos next post-if it doesn't snow. Ack. I feel the gardening muscles coming back to life after half a year and starting to ache already.

So about Art. No, not Art the college algebra instructor who was barely two years older than my flirty 18 and who at 6'5" was extremely more interesting than 'x' and 'y' unless you were talking chromosomes 'back in the day' at Ball State U.

No, not local car collector Art Gakstatter and his wife Cookie, to whom I sold Longaberger baskets for a time. I just got a kick out of saying their names. Of course, my children use 'gak' as a verb to alert me to partially-digested cat deposits about the house.

And no, not Art M., one of my all-time favorite customers from work: the kind of person who makes doing business a pleasure, who enjoys a good chat about families or business, and who shows you he gets that having a life and having a job are two different things.

So about my art: I was thinking while I was doodling random heads that my faces weren't half bad. No, not Picasso good. Not even like-my-famous-art-friends good. Just good 'for me.' See, I never thought I could draw. In fact, I don't think I could when I was a kid. My drawings from imagination were nothing special, no perceptive perspective, no amazing use of colors. But, by junior high school, I must have shown either some kind of talent or perhaps just amazing organizational skills (OCD, anyone? Yes, just a little), or maybe just enthusiasm, because a couple different art teachers took me under their wing, not necessarily for drawing, but for creating stuff.

Suddenly, I could do 'it.' And the more I believed I could do it, the better my 'stuff' seemed to look, at least to me. I remember being asked by the librarian to make bulletin boards when I was in seventh grade, and it got me out of some other class. I remember making an album cover in eighth grade that was a highlight because I learned to score paper. Big deal, right? By ninth grade, drawing all those biology cross sections was a breeze, and I still remember with pride my frog done in pencil that the teacher gushed on about.

So, my question is: could I do it just because I believed I could do it? Or did I/do I have some artistic talent that comes from a gene pool that just needed to be let loose? Could I draw those faces last night because I believed I could, fully intended to, before I even got out my pencils and sketch pad? Or was my right or left brain (whichever side isn't still thinking about algebra class) just properly engaged with all the drawing neurons from eye to finger firing?

I don't know. But either way, I like it.

What's a Convenzione without a little Shopping and Swapping and Selling?

The ZNE Convenzione http://www.znecon.com/ last weekend had so much eye candy that I don't think my glasses fit anymore! Naturally, I had to come home with a "few" treasures. Few is a relative term when your suitcase gets weighed. In the top photo is a little nestie I got at Miss Vicky's Cut-it-Up store in Colfax, CA. It is by blog friend Karyn Gartel, so that is even cooler. The batty girl is by Lori Mitchell, and I got it at American Harvest, an unbelievable store in Pleasanton, CA., where you can buy works from Lisa Kaus, Ingrid Pomeroy, Iva Wilcox, Colleen Moody, Sally Jean Alexander and many more artists from our little circle. The dolly box is by Iva, and I got it at the ZNE vendor fair. The bracelet is by Miss Vicky herself-talk about eye candy-her bracelets are good enough to eat. More about her store later. The birdy is a Lisa Kaus original and is a 6 x 6 chunky canvas, which she signed for me.

Next up are darling ATCs I got in our swaps. Pictured are cards by Gina Gabriell, Nadine Johnson, Gina Halle, Jackie Baxted, and Lani Kent. The cards I made are here http://lillysoflondonish.blogspot.com/2008/08/on-zne-convenzione-countdown.html. Finally, we also did a chunky or 'zaftig' book swap. I made the cake pages here http://lillysoflondonish.blogspot.com/2008/06/sunday-storms-sweets-siblings-and-swaps.html and in return, received this book chock-full of 4 x 4 pages by other artists. The cover is by Donna Cook, but each book was entirely different. It was fun to get a page by Nadine Johnson that nearly matched the ATC she gave me! It was also fun to see pages from friends who were not there like Mary Ann http://firstborn.wordpress.com/ and her sister Jo http://labouroflovex3.blogspot.com/. Extra books were sold as a fundraiser by ZNE We Care Coordinator Elena Etcheverry of Scrapbook Royalty http://www.elena.travelingprincess.com/ and proceeds benefitted Bernie Berlin's A Place to Bark http://aplacetobark.blogspot.com/ and the Pink Sky project http://chelise.typepad.com/stevie_brianna/

Sally Jean's Pretty Little Things - for Me!

I was so pleased to finally receive the charms I ordered from Sally Jean, author of Pretty Little Things. I had been coveting these miniature silver soldered collages for months, and then to my surprise, the book was our ZNE August Book Club assignment. After a month of pouring over the book and completing writing and art assignments, my charms arrived, as if to reward me for "graduating." I added the four small ones (G, create, home and chocolate chip fairy) to a silver charm bracelet where I also added danglies I made out of "that" turquoise as Sally Jean calls that shade of robin's egg blue. The larger pendant, the Shopping Fairy, could make a necklace or I am hoping to find a tiny silver easel for it. It is about 1 x 3 inches. The charms are much tinier. Love it!