Here’s the team:
Monique of A Half-Baked Notion
Christine of One Kiss Creations
Cynthia of Antiquity Travelers
Sally of The Studio Sublime
Therese of Therese's Treasures
Alicia of All The Pretty Things
and me makes 7
Welcome to the excuse portion of the blog post. I’m late posting since I decided a couple days ago to completely scrap my design and start new. Naturally, I finished the piece late last night and thought I would take a little break before starting photos and writing. Yeah…. guess who woke up all confused on the couch at 3 am?
Ok now we’ve got that bit out of the way. This month our creative spark was courtesy of Therese of Therese's Treasures who chose the theme of “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds” – I’ll use her words as to the why:
“Why you ask? Well simple really, April's birthstone is a diamond and the Beatles's song "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" kept playing over and over in my head. If you are not familiar with the song you can listen to it here.”
As soon as I had her package in my hand, so full of sparkling crystal and beautiful blues I was picturing that diamond studded sky. I’m borrowing Therese’s photo below as I forgot the before photo. The beautiful piece of fused glass that she sent me I envisioned as Lucy’s dress, and got to work turning it into Lucy floating through the sky full of diamonds. You can’t see what I’m talking about since I cut it apart when I was unimpressed with the overall flexibility and wearability. It turns out glass is not very bendy – who knew.
I had been humming the song again, having a little rethink on what I would make when I started to get really stuck on orange. There needed to be lots of orange for the “With tangerine trees and marmalade skies” of the first verse. Now I’m not even sure what a tree that grows tangerines looks like but I was imagining a tree the colour of tangerine all over. So I went with that.
The right hand side of the glass Therese made started to look like the canopy of a tangerine coloured tree to me and when I turned to my stash of beads it didn’t take long for all sorts of things to look like marmalade sky. Orange and yellow is so very far from my comfort zone, I did my best to lean right into the trepidation.
I was thrilled to put to work three newly acquired lampwork beads from Julie Bowen that really helped the rest of the design come to life. That orange lentil on the left and the yellow and orange ones you see are on the right are the ones that made me think of tangerine branches and branches in silhouette across a marmalade sky. I continued the idea in making a somewhat leafy textured look to the polymer bezel.
I have a massive supply of my own “idea” beads. They are ones I play around with and they aren’t necessarily done until they end up in a piece of jewelry someday. The two you see either side of the focal (and the other just out of this shot) are those types of beads. I had made random shaped bezels and filled them with different foil like glitters and resin, just cuz, about two years ago. So for this project they were drilled (I love polymer for never having to commit to a hole position) and I decided to facet the edge so I could unify them with some more orange and wispy black.
It’s strung and knotted with thin leather to keep the black of the glass flowing through, with a sprinkling of diamonds too of course. I think you get to be Lucy by wearing this instead of Lucy in a necklace so I’m very happy I scrapped plan A.
Then there was this line that just demanded earrings :
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Towering over your head
Why yes, I do have just the thing to be cellophane flowers! A little spring green and a few more “diamonds” and Lucy is really looking fine! Whatever you call that shape of crystal I love, love, love it!
I hope you enjoyed that little acid trip with me, I sure did.
I am totally daring someone out there to make some jewelry inspired by the “Where rocking horse people eat marshmellow pies” because I bet that would be pretty darn trippy.
I loved having these ideas dance in my head – Thanks Therese! I can’t wait to go see what everyone else got up to.
Here we are again
Monique of A Half-Baked Notion
Christine of One Kiss Creations
Cynthia of Antiquity Travelers
Sally of The Studio Sublime
Therese of Therese's Treasures
Alicia of All The Pretty Things
and me makes 7
