Lots of new things

It's finally been raining a bit and things generally look like they're getting greener and better around here.  Even though it's been pretty hot it still doesn't feel 100% like summer.  I keep getting a fall feeling.

I was going through some things and came across a suitcase where I stored some items I made around a decade ago.  Bad things that needed disassembling for salvage and discarding.  But I found some gems.  

Folk necklace

Several posts ago I mentioned an art-teacher-neighbor of mine who suddenly decided to give all her stuff away and move to India.  I was lucky to receive many of her art supplies.  The best things were a lot of beads she brought back from Ghana.  


I had never seen anything like them before, and I can say this lot of beads is what inspired me to feel like taking up jewelry making again back then.  It didn't go far--I had no idea where to find the type of stuff I wanted to use and I suppose I ended up getting distracted by life and just let go of jewelry until a couple years ago again.  


Anyway, I was so happy to find these particular bauxite beads.  Believe it or not, I had attached them to bookmarks on dark nylon cord.  Seems so weird and wasteful.  I'd forgotten all about that.  But I remember making them now--to distress the cord and give it a faux age worn look to match the vibe of the beads, I took it outside on the balcony concrete and pulled the cord under a rock.


But that one larger bead there at the left with the big crazy chunk divets, I obsessed over.  I couldn't imagine what it was.  Or that you could just obtain beads like these and use them in jewelry.  Very inspiring.  


Also in the find, and shown, are two of the first polymer clay beads I ever made.  I tried to instill a general color and pitted look of the bauxite into them.  Not-so-successfully, I think now.  But they are very sturdy and redeemable, so I'll alter them with a black paint wipe and see how they turn out.


            Lots of new things listed in the shop...

I've been incorporating some of the macrame leather cords I made on the road trip.  Lots of the supplies I purchased there as well.

Dark Statement

More...

Shabby rhinestones for days...

Steel oval hoopers

     I've been having some kind of mental roadblock when it comes to listing things.  It's like I just resist it, and it makes no sense since it's the easiest thing in the world.

I don't mean taking the pictures, editing them, any of that.  I actually enjoy that.  Just the physical act of making the listing.  Can't figure it out.  I think I just have too many listings again.  Nearing 225 or thereabouts.  I've decided not to renew anything that expires organically.  Some of it needs reworking anyway, perhaps.

Talisman earrings

Here is some unbraided, unmacramed suede cord.  I love it but I had to force myself to leave it alone.  The sell was doubling it and the fabric wrap.  Does the pendant ring a bell?  It's a 70s icon.  Avon.  I love that 70s industrial-organic-post-psychedelic-tree-energy-free-to-be-you-and-me-enormous-oversize-rounded-geometric-public-art kind of style.  

Not-really-zoo-architecture pendant necklace

I used to call it 'zoo architecture' style in the 80s to describe it.  Not enough time had passed for me to put it in context of its place and meaning.  When I was a kid in the 70s, I was very aware of it but it seemed removed from a normal or contemporary aesthetic.  Even though it was pervasive.  The style was all over the covers of our textbooks, in mosaics in the school hallways; it was especially present in the public library, the zoo, etc.  Those places flourished in the 70s so they reflect the progressive art style of the time.  I'm going to have to explore this more--how the specific qualitites of the art might reflect the first taste of the very beginnings of the post-civil rights/women's lib/Vietnam eras.  Lots of basic symbols present, stylized, and  reworked.  

Here, in the pendant, there is a cross and a flower incorporated into one another, merging in either a descent or ascent of the western religious (the cross) into or out of the flower--a four petaled one; a four petaled lotus is the symbol for the root chakra, and this particular flower looks extremely similar to the lotus-chakra found in traditional eastern yoga illustrations.  

Of course it's also meaningful as a symbol of the 'flower power,' and the associated 'freeness' of that.  So we've got the spirit of the west merging with the spirit of the east, or masculine/feminine, light/dark, yin/yang, the greeting or reconciliation of opposites.  But note how it is all very compartmentalized and rigid, lacking feminine traits of fluidity and a sense of yielding--the texture even hints at wood or branches, male tree energy.  There's a masculine, not-ready-for-prime-time kind of overtone.  However, when the pendant is inverted, it fairly forms the Venus symbol, or the woman symbol--a circle on top of a cross.

Whatever the case, pendant-wise, it's got a great faux warrior kind of feel.  

Enough about that.

More new jewelry...

I've also been doing more crimping.  Anyone else?

Wrapped Crystal Pendant

Button chandeliers