Oh, that's right, I'm supposed to update this from time to time!

Well, I've got good reason. (I always do!) I've been spending the last two weeks doing some intense learning-curve activities, trying to remember how to fuse glass after that class we took back in February, trying to save up money to buy fusing equipment and glass, and then actually trying to find the time to do it! I wound up buying a glass grinder after I swore I was never going to need one, and sure enough, as I was walking down Mary Jane's driveway with one big box of jewelry boxes in one hand and a small box of glass cabs in another, I tripped spectacularly and dropped the small box, chipping two or three of the larger cabs. No worries, though - when I got home yesterday, I set up the grinder and ground down the cabs that were chipped and then fire polished them while I was making dinner. When I looked in the kiln this morning, they were PERFECT! I ground two of them into some unusual shapes, so they may not be for everybody's taste, but they're definately sell-able! Yay!

No pictures to post yet, but I'll have those sometime tomorrow or the day after...

In the meantime, I've started taking Middle Eastern dance classes on Wednesday evenings. Wow! I never thought it would be so hard and so addicting! I absolutely love it! Chapin is in the same class, although I started almost a month ago, and I have yet to have a class with her in it! Hehehe... But I bought a leopard-print hip scarf covered in coins to practice in, and I just love it, I love it! It's so much harder than I thought it would be - I get the beat, and I can move on the beat, but it's really all about isolating different muscle groups. When your hips are moving, your shoulders have to be still. Not as easy as it sounds! There's a woman in the class who is REALLY good, and I watch her and the teacher doing hip movements and then I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I realize that I'm not as flexible as they are. They can really move deep into a particular dance move, but I can barely move my hips past my shoulders! I've been living for Wednesday evenings, and tonight is no exception. Now, if only gas would drop below $3.15 per gallon up here...

And speaking of high gas prices, what the heck is going on with that?! You all know that someone is getting fat and rich off of those high prices, and it's certainly no one that I know! Oil companies are posting record quarterly profits, and the little guy is suffering. And I'm not just talking about having to pay for gas, but the people that buy the gas for their vehicles can't spend money on other things, and pretty soon it feels like you work just so you can have enough money to fill up your gas tank and get to work! It makes owning a hybrid seem more and more attractive. You just have to balance the cons of owning a hybrid with paying through the nose for gas. Yikes.

Anyway, I went down to the NJ Folk Festival last weekend with Min Ping and Min Yee. Wow. I haven't been down there in YEARS for that event! It was so much fun! It was just like an excuse to sit on the grass and eat for an hour and a half. We had Korean food, and I had a fake Philly Cheese steak sandwich, and then on Sunday, Min Ping and I went to this killer Indian all-you-can-eat buffet before I went home. Wow. I really miss having a good Indian restaurant nearby. Oh, well, there are other things I love about the Adirondacks...

So, I'll post more photos in the next couple of days. Maybe I'll have something else interesting to write about!

Sort of new finished work for April 2007

Okay, more finished work from the last two months or so... This is what I've been doing while hibernating indoors from all the snow we had! Some of these pieces will be for sale very soon on Etsy and on my website!

This first piece is a set of labradorite cabochons that I got as part of a mixed bag from Fire Mountain Gems. I bezeled each of them with techniques developed by Jamie Cloud Eakin, and then wove Ndebele tubes embellished with freshwater pearls to connect them. The whole piece is attached to two twisted Ndebele ropes and finished with a sterling silver plated clasp.







This bracelet was one of those "Ah-hah!" moments I had while soaking in a hot bath and perusing one of my vintage jewelry books. There was a photograph of a 1950's copper cuff bracelet with two twisted strips down the middle, and I just thought to myself, why not with Sensuede and peyote stitch? It came out pretty good, considering that was the last of my Sensuede...





The inspiration for this piece came from a set of Tiger Eye beads I bought in New York City back in August, that I wound up not even using in the finished piece! Funny how things like that happen... But the seed beads I used for the embroidery were also from that same bead shopping trip. I wasn't sure what to do with the embroidered panels when they were finished, but when I tried the piece on, it was stunning with my black sweater and brown high-heeled boots! I called this piece, "Tiger Drapes".










A piece that was waaaaay long overdue for finishing was this green and brown ruffled collar. I actually started this piece in January of 2006 while visiting Kathy, Kevin, Kady and Kinsey out in Reno. There was NOTHING to do on the five hour flight to Las Vegas... NOTHING! So, I pulled out my beads and bezeled the cabs. I actually finished the actual embroidery back in March of '06, but couldn't figure out what to do for fringe and finishing. It took me months to come up with the idea of - ta-dah! - adding a brick-stitch ruffle to the edges. And then it took me another eight weeks to actually finish the ruffle! I didn't realize how many little seed beads there were on the edge of this piece...







Another piece way long overdue for finishing was this lovely tribal-styled neckpiece I am calling "Azteca". Again, I finished the embroidery sometime around Easter last year while watching "Bride and Prejudice", which was a fantastic movie from the writer/director of "Bend It Like Beckham". But a fringe style just kept eluding me... Finally, I sat down one day with my bamboo tube beads and a few colors of seed beads and spent damn near an entire day strining a few strands of fringe, then deciding that I hated it and tearing it all out. But I think I finally got it right! And one of the best parts is that the natural bamboo tubes make a nice, soft noise when you walk with this piece on... Kind of like the breeze blowing through a garden...






The name for this piece, "Who's Getting Married?" is what Tom said when he saw me finishing it! I really believe that what you watch on t.v. or listen to on the radio has some kind of influence over your designs as you are working, and while designing and stitching this piece, I watched the Matt Damon/Heath Ledger film, "The Brothers Grimm" over and over and over. I think a little bit of the raw grace from the film rubbed off on the design. I used moonstone rondelles, tiny opal chips, and mother of pearl flowers. Again, the fringe was the hardest part, but I finally found a delicate pattern that wouldn't take away from the embroidery.

>WHEW!< Think that's enough? I've got a few more projects now to finish up, and it's getting really cold here in my basement office! (We've GOT to fix the heat down here!) Coming soon, four more pieces! (What's my husband's name again?)

Chicken stuff...

Well, wow. I guess I've been a little lax in updating this! But I've got good reason, really - on March 6, we received our baby chicks from the hatchery in Iowa! We are now the proud parents of 16 chickens who will supply us with fresh eggs for the next several years. It was sort of a nightmare at first - the hatchery shipped them during a BLIZZARD, and as a result, they were stuck for an additional 24 hours on an unheated truck without food or water, which proved fatal for eleven of the original twenty seven that we received. (Needless to say, we were greatly disturbed by this, and I let the hatchery know exactly how I felt about the whole thing!) Tom and I spent the first seventy-two hours getting up every few hours in the middle of the night to check on the ones that weren't doing so well, and we told everyone: if you're not sure if you're ready to have a baby, start with chickens! Nothing like rousing yourself at 2 a.m. when it's twenty below zero and dragging yourself out into a dark garage to check on dying baby chicks... Yikes! And of course, the day we got them was the start of a week-long cold snap where the daytime high temperatures ranged up to about...oh...five degrees above zero...! Good thing we have the monitor heater in the workshop to keep the place around eighty degrees for the little babies...

BUT, the sixteen that we have now are all thriving, and they are just some of the most beautiful creatures I've ever seen! They each have these wonderful personalities, and I haven't told Tom yet, but I've started naming them... Last week, they discovered that they had WINGS and that they could FLY! So Tom built them a little set of "chicken bleachers" so they have a place to perch and roost. They are a ton of work, I won't kid anyone about that, but they are so much fun, too! We easily kill a few hours each day taking care of them and then just hanging about and watching them. When they sleep at night, they all pile on top of each other, and as I told our friend Rob (who is in on the whole chicken-raising operation with us), it looks just like someone emptied a bag of chickens out onto the floor of the brooding box! Next step: Tom and Rob have to buy lumber and windows and are going to build a well-insulated chicken coop out in the backyard under the pole barn for the girls. I feel as if I'm living on a homestead! Kinda nice, actually...

And on that note, of things kinda nice, I sold a necklace yesterday to the woman who works in the lab at the wastewater plant with Tom. She's been after me for a while that she wants to buy one of my pieces, and before she had expressed an interest in buying The Blue Beyond, but she wound up buying We're All the Same But Different! That's the last piece I would have ever figured she would like, but she asked me to lengthen it to a 20" necklace, which I did, and I delivered it yesterday afternoon to her. She put it on right away, and I have to admit, I just laughed out loud because it looked PERFECT on her! And it gave me such a good feeling, knowing that I crafted this necklace that she absolutely fell in love with, and then when she bought it, I felt like it really made her feel good about herself, and that made me feel good! It was just such a happy-Zen moment, that I immediately went home last night and started sketching a whole bunch of new designs to work on (in all my spare time, har har har...)

So, on Tuesday, I am driving out to Clayton with my friend Mary Jane to visit the gift shop at the Handweaving Museum and Art Center to talk to the gift shop manager and programming director about selling my work through their gift shop. How exciting! My first museum! It's such a beautiful museum, and I can't wait to look around the gift shop with Kim on Tuesday... I was hoping to have a line of fused glass jewelry ready to go by then, but I just haven't had the time (or the money) to invest in a whole new line of materials... As it is, I don't think I could have done much kiln work in the workshop with the baby chicks in there, anyway - I don't want to expose them to anything else that could make them ill! But, at some point in the near future, I will get into the glass fusing work more, and then I'll post some new work on my website and on my Etsy store.

Thanks for reading my blog, everybody, and I hope everyone has a wonderful, relaxing weekend! I am going to spend the weekend finishing my application for the Philadelphia Museum of Craft's annual show, so cross your fingers for me!

Fusing glass is fuuuuuuun!

Wow, what a fun weekend! Mary Jane and I met in Burlington and had lunch at the Vermont Pub and Brewery, where, to ease my guilt at leaving Tom for the weekend, I bought him a growler (half gallon jug) of Dogbite beer. We stopped at Vermont Beads and Fibers in Middlebury on our way down to Chester.

We managed to find the Quail Hollow Inn (www.quailhollowinn.com) in the dark in an area where I've never been before (an accomplishment!), and were completely enchanted with the place. One of the innkeepers, Peter, gave us a tour of the place before showing us to our room. This photo is the reception area of the Inn, looking into the dining room.

Our room - woa. The bed had to be one of the most comfortable beds I'd ever slept in, and the room was warm and cozy. We were right down the hall from the staircase that led to the bar and the hot tub! When we got back from dinner, our beds had been turned down and a little piece of chocolate had been left on our pillows. (I could totally have gotten used to that!)

The next morning, breakfast was an upside-down apple pancake cooked in maple syrup. Hot tea and fresh orange juice were already at the table, and Jane and I just loved it!

So, stuffed to the gills, we headed over to the Fletcher Farm School in Ludlow where we met our teacher, Cheryl, and the six other women we would be learning with this weekend. We spent what seemed like thirty seconds learning how to cut glass with the different styles of glass cutters, and then off we went!

We were each given a 1/2 pound bag of dichroic "scrap" glass, which were leftover pieces from whatever glass supplier Cheryl purchased them from. She showed us how to measure and cut a straight line (which I never did figure out!), and told us that for our first pieces, we should just do a single layer, meaning, a base of opaque or transluscent glass, a piece of dichroic or two in the middle, and a clear cap on top. Half of the fun was sorting through all the colors and patterns and textures of the glass to come up with different designs. We put our first attempts onto small ceramic brick shelves covered in special ceramic fiber paper, and into the kilns they went! When they came out two hours later, we were shocked - not only were they all beautiful, but they looked almost NOTHING like what we had put into the kiln two hours ago! Hahahaa!

This photo shows all the different cabs I made this weekend. Other students embedded fine silver wire into their cabs to use as earrings or glued bails on for use as pendants, but I left mine as cabochons so that I can embroider around them to make bracelets and pendants.

The second day was just as good as the first, except that we had to go home at the end of it!

For breakfast, another gourmet dish at the Quail Hollow Inn - this time it was French toast with orange zest cooked in honey, with maple syrup that, as Bob said, "kept us bouncing all day"! When we got to Fletcher Farm School, Cheryl had just finished loading up the kilns with the last of the pieces to be fused from yesterday. We worked on learning finishing techniques, which included using a glass grinder to sand down and straighten the edges a bit, how to cut a backing out of glass, and how to make a hole or include a wire finding into our piece. We all totally loved using the grinder - it was completely mesmerizing to hold our little pieces of glass up to the grinding wheel and watch them get smooth and straight! Then we would either firepolish them or fuse them again with a backing to create a hole for stringing or attaching to a piece of jewelry.

When we were finished, Cheryl handed out a little certificate that stated that we had each completed fourteen hours of class in fusing dichroic glass. I laughed and told everyone that the sad part was that I would probably get more use out of this certificate than I would out of my four-year college degree! At least I got a laugh out of everyone...

It was such a downer to have to get up this morning and go back to work! But this evening, I'll sit down and look at the Delphi Glass website and figure out what I need to buy to start making these lovely little gems here at home. I can't wait for my next show at the Lake Placid Library - I hope to have a whole slew of these made into jewelry and ready for sale!

Let it snow, ha ha ha!

This is the view from our driveway facing the road. Note the 2' walls of snow that we created with the snowblower so that we could get the cars in and out! Hahahaa!! Sometimes I really love living in the North Country - like last night when it was still snowing an inch an hour, and we took Moose outside in the yard to watch the snow and listen to it hitting the power lines and shrubs...

So, no way was I going into Lake Placid yesterday during that blizzard, and I didn't make it in today either, since by the time that the roads were semi-passable (read: still snow-covered), I was (unsuccessfully) fighting a killer migraine. Oh, well, life in the Adirondacks...

Well, the other day I received my notification that Metis was accepted by the Mountain Lake PBS Arts Auction for April! My excitement was dampened with a bit of sadness at the thought that I will have to part with her, but I feel better knowing that whoever wins her in the auction will give her a good home. I am so excited to be a part of this!

And, my friend Mary Jane and I will be traveling to Vermont the weekend of the 23rd to take a class at the Fletcher Farm School of Fine Crafts in dichroic glass fusing! That should be a fun weekend. We get to spend two whole days melting glass, and then stay in a beautiful Victorian bed and breakfast. Wow. This is going to just be sooooo cool - and then once I know how to make these beautiful dichroic glass cabochons, who knows what my art will start looking like?

Speaking of my art, I have started on a disturbing trend... During the month of January, I found myself cranking out pieces like crazy, and I really did manage to get a lot of work done and posted on the website. But now that I am working on pieces for the Bead and Button Show and some new projects for Beadwork magazine, I find that I get to a certain point in a piece and then get stuck. I managed to bezel and connect all the labradorite cabs for one piece, only to get stuck on the strap. (And this after I managed to make two twisted herringbone tubes for the strap which took me close to 16 hours!!!) And then I embroidered and backed a brass collar from Designer's Findings with moonstone, mother of pearl and opal chips, only to find that I am completely stumped when I sit down to fringe it. And then there's the beautiful swirly brown piece I started last August when I went to the city with Min Ping and Min Yee and bought those funky tiger's eye rectangles - I am a mere twelve 2" rows of bead embroidery away from backing and fringing the piece, but every time I sit down to work on it, I'm stuck. I finally forced myself to sit down and start "Her Name Was Bunny..." for the Bead and Button show, and I'm managing that nicely as long as I don't think too hard while I'm stitching... I think I need to watch "Kinky Boots" again or at least listen to the soundtrack to get my mind back on track. Does anybody else every get stuck creatively? What the heck do you do to get unstuck?

Well, I hope everybody has gotten shoveled out by now, and I also hope that everyone stays warm during the deep freeze this weekend!

"An Inconvenient Truth"

Tom and I just watched this movie this evening, literally, we shut the DVD player off about fifteen minutes ago, and I was so moved by that film, I have to write my thoughts down here, on my little soap box, while they are still fresh in my mind.

The first thing that I loved about that movie was that Al Gore hit the nail on the head when he said that we have a moral responsibility to take care of this planet and this issue. You can sit there and wrangle all day over the science behind it, and you could spend the next two hundred years debating the numbers behind it all, but really, we don't have time for that anymore. Whether we like it or not, our world is changing. I can see it here, in the Adirondacks, and we've only lived her for about ten years. This is not the same Adirondacks as it was when I moved here and we had our first snowstorm in October. This year, the temperature did not drop below zero until just this week. Eight years ago, we were sub-zero before Christmas. I found all the ice in and ice out information for Mirror Lake when I was going through some of the Historical Society's archival records the other day - thirty years ago, ice in was as early as the beginning of November. This year, in 2006-07, I don't think there's enough ice on Mirror Lake yet to support even a dog. (Two dogs actually broke through last week, according to the dog catcher.)

So, you can sit back and say, yeah, okay, we're in a warming trend, but so what, it'll just cool off again. Will it? Human beings are so changing the face of this planet to the extent that we just don't know if things will cool off again. How do we compensate for lost ecological niches? All of my reading back in college pointed towards the new ecological niches being filled by bacteria and viruses - small, simple organisms that can easily wipe out millions of us larger, more complex organisms. The ocean currents are changing. The polar bears could be extinct in twenty years. Twenty years. That's well within my lifetime. Imagine a child being born today who will grow up in a world without polar bears. (I think Coca Cola may have to find a new cartoon character for their Christmas advertising. Hope it's not an ebola virus.)

It all comes back to the things that I researched in high school. The rate of consumption in this country is staggering. And every one of us is at fault - my generation are the children of the baby boomers, who grew up with a lack of material goods. They gave us too much, and now, we expect "things". The problem with mindless consumption is just that - it's mindless. If we go out to the store, buy a plastic pre-packaged import from China, throw a card on it and give it to someone, well, what have we given them? What happened to the days when everything was made by hand, and the costs of things reflected that? If you needed something, you either made it yourself, or you paid for it.

The implications are so tangled, so vast, that when I start to trace all the route causes in my mind of the whole problem of mindless consumption, I start to get dizzy. (Or it could just be a cold coming on, I'll let you know in a few days.) But the other thing that Al Gore said that was right on the nose was this: we have the power to change these patterns. We have the power to stop what is happening. We have a CHOICE. It doesn't have to be like this.

I firmly believe that if more people were aware of what was going on and the relative simplicity of the solutions that the issue of global warming would be more of a non-issue. And I'm going to sound like some kind of bougeoius pig here, but I firmly believe that most of the problem rests with the oil and gas industry and the automobile makers. It's corporate America that is making the problem worse, and it is corporate America that has to back down. But how do you get the richest people in the world to give it all up? People are frightened. Fear is powerful. Powerful enough to make these people do everything they can to keep things the same. Change is frightening. But what is more frightening - the change to our global climate and the potential for the ultimate collapse of the world as we know it, or a change of our economy from an energy glutton to a more renewable energy economy?

Tom and I both know that we leave far less of a "footprint" on the world than the majority of people in our state. But that movie left me feeling like that's not enough. It really left me feeling like I have to sit down and think about what else I can do to get somebody else out there to sit down and think about what THEY can do to change the world, too.

There. Now that that's done, I'm going to put on my pajamas, sit in front of the wood fire with my dog, and then go to bed.

New Year's Resolutions

I do this every year. In January, try to come up with new goals and I look back at what I did (and didn't) accomplish the year before. So, my goals for 2007:

1. Enter four pieces of work in the Bead and Button Show
2. Submit a portfolio of work to The Guild
3. Apply to the Philadelphia Museum of Art Fine Craft Show
4. Submit photos to The Crafts Report for their Bead showcase issue
5. Work out an advertising budget and take out ads in The Crafts Report, Beadwork, and possibly Ornament or Bead and Button
6. Research high-end fine craft shows in NY, NJ, VT and NH for 2008.
7. Take as many classes as I can
8. Re-evaluate my business and marketing plans and update as necessary
9. Continue to create work - set goals for creating a certain number of neckpieces, bracelets, and earrings
10. Continue to evaluate and re-design marketing materials as needed
11. Continue to submit projects to teach at national and local shows
12. Continue mailings to retail galleries and individual customers to update them on upcoming shows and events
13. Find some time to sleep! (Ha!)

I think I did reasonably well in my goals for 2006. I managed to get my marketing materials printed (twice, grummble grummble), I did a mailing to over 200 galleries over the summer, and I managed to start a relationship with a small gallery in Lake Placid. And I think I finally got a handle on the whole photography thing, grummble grummble grummble, just in time to find out that I can now get a 7 megapixel camera for what I paid for my 4 megapixel camera two years ago. >SIGH<

I hope everybody who's reading this had a very happy holiday. A million times during those two weeks, I kept thinking I should add a post to the blog, but to tell the truth, I was so tired at the end of the day after spending time with my two nieces (ages 5 and 2 1/2), that I didn't even feel like switching on the computer. It was great, though. Kathy and Kevin and Kinsey and Kady came out just in time for Kinsey's 5th birthday, and then we got to spend Christmas Eve together, had the present-opening-frenzy on Christmas morning, and then got to spend New Year's Eve together drinking pink champagne and watching the Hee-Haw marathon on satellite t.v. (Really, the champagne helped!) We got to take Kinsey sledding at Angel and Eric's house, and Kathy, Kevin, Tom and I went to go see "Night at the Museum" on New Year's Eve. It all happened too fast. One minute they were here, and the next, we were packing up the van for their trip back to Albany and their flight back to Reno.

The photo of the bracelet is the bracelet I made for Kathy for Christmas. Actually, I started it for her birthday last year, and then got distracted with my day job and never got back to finishing it. When Thanksgiving rolled around, I thought, I've got to finish this for her, I know she wanted one! So, I just plugged away at it while watching my Netflix movies, and made sure that I took a few good photos before I gave it to her. It was so funny - Christmas morning, she opened her package from us, and saw that it was a box of echinacea tea. She laughed and said, gee, thanks, I know we've been sick, but... I told her to open the box to see what was inside of it and then explained that I had to use the tea box because it was the only box I could find that would fit the bracelet! Ha ha ha!

Sooo, let's see, what else is new. I submitted a piece to our local Mountain Lakes PBS station for their annual Arts Auction in April. I was amazed at how quickly she came together. I got the idea from an illustration in a book called "Living Wicca", and then when I saw this beautiful ceramic face by Diane Brieglieb sitting in my drawer, I thought that this was the way to work her up. The neckstrap, admittedly, was a bit of a nightmare. I didn't want to have a thin strap with such a dramatic focal pendant, but I didn't want to have a strap that took forever and would overpower the pendant. In the end, I kept thinking, okay, what's the second right answer? And I came up with it at four o clock in the morning as I was trying to get back to sleep. (Of course, when else do I come up with any decent ideas, right?) I took her to Mary Jane and got help taking pictures of her because I just knew that I wouldn't be able to do her justice. I named her Metis after a suggestion from my friend Ann to name her after one of the Greek or Roman muses. Metis was the muse of wise counsel, and I feel like that has a particular significance in my life right now as I try to figure out what path I am on and what path I want to take in the future.

Well, we're finally getting some snow, but unfortunately, it's turned into ice. I've got a million web updates to make, so I think I'm going to go off and try to get those done, and then post some new work later this week. Take care, everyone!

I'm on the cover...I'm on the cover...I'M ON THE COVER!

Just for the heck of it tonight, after work and checking my email at home, I went over to Interweave Press' website to see if they had the new issue information on the site yet. It took me a minute to process what I was seeing - that the image on the COVER of the new issue was MY necklace! I started screaming, which terrified my husband, who was upstairs grinding venison into homemade sausage. He came running downstairs with venison-covered bloody hands and when he saw the cover, he started screaming, too! I still can't believe it - I'M A COVER GIRL!

The first person I called was Mary Jane. I was still screaming and hyperventilating, and I had to grab a glass of white wine to calm myself down, and Tom said to me, "Maybe you shouldn't call Mary Jane until after you've calmed down." I said, "Yeah, you're probably right," and then, after a few seconds of sheer giddiness, I said, "Nah, you're wrong, I'm calling her RIGHT NOW!" So, after I finished giggling down the phone to her, I went back upstairs to finish cooking dinner and just giggled some more. "I'm on the cover. Hee hee. Did I mention I was on the cover?"

It's one of those things. You don't want to be so arrogant as to think that YOUR work would look fabulous on the cover of a magazine, even when secretly, you really believe in it and in yourself. And then something like this comes along and you think, "Okay, no more secrets! My work is good enough for Interweave Press to stick smack dab on the cover of a leading beading publication!" Woa!

And to think that yesterday I was completely down in the dumps for getting my work rejected by a major museum gift shop down in NYC. Bah! Who needs 'em? In a few years, they'll be begging me!

I think this means I have to start applying to more fine craft shows. I think I may have something here...

New Finished Work!

These are some of the newly finished pieces I had for sale at the Guy Brewster Hughes Gallery in Lake Placid on Friday. They are made from my handmade glass beads and some of the yummy gemstone beads I've been hoarding for the last, oh, ten years or so...! These will all be for sale on VanBeads.com very, very soon, but for now, here's a little sneak peek...

This piece, tentatively called "Surf 'n' Turf", is made from six of my handmade beads and a strand of genuine Peruvian opal rondelles. The beads were made with a base of ivory glass over which I rolled some silver foil, and then layered some aqua and coral glass. The whole piece is very earthy and organic but very artsy at the same time. This is going to be a hard one to part with, but I want it to find a good home.

This is a piece made with another set of favorite beads called Tiger Beads. I think these were some of the very first beads I made with my kiln - because they were so big and chunky, they never survived the cooling process in the vermiculite. I was particularly upset by the loss of a great, big sculptured focal I made in this style. But now I've got the kiln, I don't lose any to heat cracks. Anyway, about the necklace - to accent the Tyger Beads, I've strung them with some very dark rutilated quartz. There are so many inclusions in these beads, they almost look black until you take a closer look at them. I alternated them with some thick onyx washers and silver spacers. The beads themselves are made from ivory, coral and intense black glass that has been stretched and wound and stretched and wound to give me those lovely ink-spot patterns, and then wound with a thick layer of clear to magnify the patterns underneath. Very cool with a t-shirt and jeans!

Okay, another piece that I love. I made these beads by forming a thick cylinder with transparent colored glass, and then wound clear glass around the ends but didn't melt it in. (Hmmm, that gives me an idea - what would have happened if I HAD melted it in?) Anyway, they were just lolling about on my work table for the longest time, until I saw these fun, funky faceted Czech glass beads from the Czechs in the Mail bead club, and then I knew I had a design! Eureka! I love this piece because it's colorful, funky and refined all at the same time. I tried the piece on with a brightly colored t-shirt, and I just loved it.

This piece is made from two of my favorite things - handmade glass beads and vintage German glass beads! Woo-hoo! I swear, to anyone who is looking at this piece, the funky cubes in shades of yellow and green and coral really are glass. They've been etched from here to the moon and back, but they really are glass. When I had displayed this at a shop years ago, more than one customer came in, believing themselves to be an "authority" on polymer clay, and telling me, the one who made the beads, in no uncertain terms that those were most certainly polymer clay and not glass. Well, surprise, folks, they really are glass. And I've got a chipped one somewhere in my bead box to prove it! Hehehe... I don't know where this one came from, but I had a ball making the square boxy-shaped beads. (I think this was the first set I made while testing out various work chairs in my studio.)

And speaking of the moon... I got an idea to start a series of hollow glass beads named after the planets. This is the first one, called "Jupiter". It is made from that yummy transluscent yellow glass I got as a promotion from Frantz Art Glass one summer when I was stocking up, and at first, I thought, this is the ugliest color of glass rod I have ever seen. What the hell am I going to DO with it?! But, sure enough, one day last spring, when I was torching at Mary Jane's house, I decided to make my warm up beads with a rod of it, and lo and behold, "Jupiter" was born! It is a hollow bead with coral tips, and wound with a thin stripe of opaque brown. It, too, slept on my work table until last weekend, I was lying in bed one morning trying to wake up when the idea hit me. (There's not much that can get me out of bed before 6:00 a.m., but a good design idea will do it every time!) The wireworking part was a little trickier, trying to get the two large silver beads to balance on the eyepin that holds the lampwork bead, but I think I finally got it. When worn, it hangs very nicely and complements almost any outfit. Next up: Pluto, created after I heard that a panel of international scientists have stripped Pluto of it's title of planet!

Whew, I think that's it for now. Did lots and lots and lots of photographing and photoshopping today. I need to take a vacation so I can get some work done! Peace, everyone!

Life

Some days, I love the freelance thing, it makes me feel like I'm my own boss (even if I am working for someone else), and I love the flexibility, and I love being able to work at home in the basement, listening to NPR and hanging with the dog. But some weeks, when I'm trying to line up work and get contracts and committments, I want to tear my hair out and scream. That's what's been going on the last few weeks - lots of hair-tearing and screaming.

Well, I don't have any new photos to post yet, but I should have a few fairly soon.

Last Sunday, I went up to the Hannukah Bazaar at temple. I was really excited to be back there for my third year in a row, and it was my best year ever for the event. I really like seeing everybody from temple and meeting new people, and Lynn brought Isaac and I sort of baby sat while she took Caroline to religious school and then over to Nutcracker rehearsal. And yesterday, I did my first-ever show at the Guy Brewster Hughes Gallery on Main Street in the Lake Placid Public Library. Louise, the gallery manager, had warned me that some days when they hold these events, no one has any sales at all. I assured her it was all in the marketing of the event. If you don't let people know you're having the event, you won't have any sales! Well, nothing much happened in the morning, until about noon. I started to get hungry, so I told Louise and her daughter Mary Anne that I was going to walk down to Soulshine Bagel and get some lunch. The day after Thanksgiving, Main Street was packed, and I stood in line for a long time. A really long time. Until I saw Mary Anne appear at the door in a total panic, and she said, "Jen, you've got to come back now, there's someone who wants to buy your jewelry!" So, I went running back up the street to the library, thinking, this was probably only a $35 sale or something, but I wanted to make sure I didn't lose it. So, I get in there, look over at the table full of the ready-to-wear line, and see that lots of it is GONE! Then this woman comes over and plunks down 4 necklaces, one of which was a $185 piece made with antique Ethiopian Tribal Silver! She bought nearly $400 worth of my jewelry like it was NOTHING! Which leads to my latest thoughts about art and life and jewelry and pricing...

I've said this before on other forums, and I'll say it again. Craft artists or fine artists should not be targeting the same market that shops at Wal-Mart. The thing that irritates me the most is seeing artists who make beautiful work and underprice it because they are afraid to charge for their time. Time is everything. Time is money. It has taken me YEARS to perfect my technique and develop my style, and I'll be damned if I'm just gonna give it away. I wish other artists felt that way as well, because when they are afraid to charge for their time, they are doing those of use who do feel our time is valuable immeasurable harm. Firstly, they are giving consumers the idea that what we do is not valuable. My father has the same problem - when someone else out there can set up your computer for less than he charges, people get a diminished sense of value. Secondly, they are selling themselves short as well, while at the same time making it harder for artists like me who are trying to make a decent, honest living from our art to make a decent, honest living. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone asked me, "But why is it so much?" I usually answer quite bluntly that while many artists do not charge for their time, I do, because my time is valuable to me. The bottom line, lesson learned from my customer yesterday who purchased all that great jewelry without blinking: if they complain about your prices, they aren't your market. And if your market is the luxury market, great! Welcome aboard! Because sometimes I forget, living up here in an area where a "good" salary is minimum wage, that there are whole cities out there, full of people who still drive SUVs despite the price of gas and who do have surplus cash to spend on goods and services like mine.

There. I'll get off my soap box now. But I would love to hear from anyone who has encountered anything similar or even anyone who disagrees with me. This is just one of my pet peeves, and lately, it's coming to the fore. It just seems that more and more people are searching for "bargains" - take the crazy people who lined up at 3:00 a.m. yesterday outside of department stores to buy video games and leather handbags. But what they're missing out on is a sense of worth, and a sense of contributing to something bigger.

Okay, that's it. Now I've got to go upstairs and make some tomato soup for dinner.

Remnants of Timbuktu

Finished the necklace last night, after nearly two years! I guess it was about time! Unfortunately, all of the photos of the full piece were terribly and fuzzy, so I'll have to re-photograph it properly tomorrow morning when the light is better.

This piece is a 20" long necklace, created from square stitched components that are linked together with silver jump rings. Each piece is embellished with brick stitch triangles, grey AB druks, and colored pressed glass pyramids. The idea for the design came from one of my favorite old books on ancient jewelry. When I had originally sketched the design, I had noted "ancient English links" on the page, but when I looked again at the photo a few months ago before embarking on the finishing of the piece, I was astonished to see that the components pictured in the book were actually of Tuareg origin, noted to be found in Timbuktu! After that, I finished creating the components and the necklace with an entirely different vision in mind. I may have a few more embellishments to add, now that I know the true origin of the original pieces.

I did some research on Timbuktu. It's fascinating. The city of Timbuktu is located in the present day country of Mali, in Africa, and has been an UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988. In 1990, it was listed as an UNESCO world heritage site in danger because of desert sands. Until 1591, it was a major African city and had acquired vast wealth due to the flourishing trade in salt, slaves, gold, ivory and other treasures that were sought by the Europeans. While the city has a rich history of war and conquerers, today, most of its residents live in poverty. The name Timbuktu has become so ingrained in the collective unconscious that a recent poll of young Britons revealed that over 60% of those surveyed believed Timbuktu to be a "mythical place", and 34% did not believe that the city even existed!

This is another design that I am submitting to Interweave Press for their consideration, and I will also be submitting it to various bead shows to teach.

Now, on another, somewhat sadder note, I received and read the last installment in the Adrian Mole series today. Sue Townsend has finished her writings on the life of Adrian Mole with "Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction". Whether you are for the war in Iraq or against it, this book will move you. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but suffice it to say that I damn near cried more than once while reading it, and this is going to become one of those books that I will re-read for the next year or two. Or three. Adrian and his family have all grown up or grown older. He attends his class reunion. His best friend Nigel has gone blind. And his sister Rosie is away studying nanobiology at University. While I finished the book in a little under five hours (my husband is going to really tease me about that!), this is one to take with me when I take a hot bath tonight and mull over its pages. I feel like the writer of the series, when your characters want to continue to live, yet you know that once you stop writing, the story is over. I can only hope that somewhere, in the imagination of Sue Townsend's many fans, that Adrian Mole and his family will continue to live.

With that in mind, I'd better wrap this up and get back upstairs to cooking dinner. Cooking has become one of the great loves of my life since I became a vegetarian. Tonight's dinner, made especially for Tom when he comes back from spending 14 hours out in 35 degrees: roasted eggplant and garlic soup; soft lentils with carmelized onions and tomatoes; kasha; and whole grain bread. I should open a restaurant!

Middle of the Week Blues...

Well, technically it's after the middle of the week, but it feels like the middle of the week for me. I feel as if I've been running a marathon all week. Worked for the Historical Society on Monday, spent Tuesday working at Ann's house, then had to make an emergency trip to the vet at 9:00 p.m. because Moose ate a mouthful of glass shards from the dish of maple-roasted nuts he pulled off the counter while we were having dinner at my in-laws'. Worked half the day for the Historical Society yesterday, then worked the other half at the Village, trying to finish their records management project. Came home, cooked dinner, and tried to get some beading done. Almost done with another necklace, I'm working on what may be the last component now. (Unless I decide that it needs one or two more to lengthen it.) Still no word on the X Marks the Spot Bracelet, but I did manage to submit five projects to BeadFest for their various shows around the country. As I develop more projects, I'll submit those, too.

Feeling completely unorganized this week. Have to sit down and make some lists: supplies that I am running out of, beads I need for projects, and I somehow have to get in touch with Designer's Findings!

Made some changes to the website the other night, but they were sort of accidental. I was trying to upload the newly finished Sounds of the Northway website on my account, but kept putting the files in the wrong folder, so I had to keep re-sending MY website! Finally got it all worked out around 11:30 p.m. Tom and I were so exhausted, we took Moose up to bed and didn't open our eyes until 7 the next morning. Yikes.

Okay, here's one of my favorite pieces and the history behind it. (She's also for sale at VanBeads.com!)

Lady in the Lake, completed August of 2006

There is a story in Lake Placid about Mabel Douglas, the famed educator and founder of Douglas College of Rutgers University. For years, Mabel had a camp on Placid Lake. One day in the late fall of 1933, Mabel's daughter went to town to run errands, and Mabel took her St. Lawrence skiff (boat) out for a row on the lake. What happened next has never been clear, but several hours later, her overturned skiff was spotted and towed back to the boathouse on the lake. Her daughter identified it as belonging to Mabel, but Mabel was never found. Fast forward thirty years to a few divers who were looking for logs at the bottom of Placid Lake near Pulpit Rock, where the water in the lake is upwards of 150 feet deep. One of the divers, walking along the lake bottom, thinks he spots a clothing-shop mannequin, and reaches over to pick up its arm. It's apparent right away that it was not a mannequin. Due to the chemistry of the lake bottom and the relatively constant temperature of the water, the body had never decomposed, and the outer two inches or so had turned into a kind of soap. Unfortunately, as the body was brought to the surface, the movement of the water across the face caused the face to dissolve, so identification was difficult. However, it was determined that this was indeed Mabel Douglas, who had disappeared on the lake thirty years prior. At this time, an investigation was opened by the New York State Troopers. A witness came forward and said that he had seen Mabel rowing that afternoon from a distance, and that he had also seen her throw something into the water and then dive in after it. (She was found with a rope tied around her neck that was attached to an anchor.) However, the case was filed as "unsolved". It was never determined if foul play was involved, or if Mabel simply took her own life.

I read about the story several years ago, and seeing this ceramic face by Diane Briglieb amongst my bead collection, I knew she was The Lady in the Lake. I created the piece to honor the memory of Mabel Douglas who was a pioneer in women's education, and who earned countless awards and honors for her work in the field of education.

The Lady in the Lake was created with a combination of techniques. First, the ceramic face was glued to a piece of Lacy's Stiff Stuff, and allowed to dry. Then, I beaded a bezel around her using size 11 Delica beads. I then worked around the face with bead embroidery, embellishing here and there, using a variety of Japanese seed beads and pressed glass beads. After that was finished, I stitched on a backing of suede-like fabric in a coordinating color. After the main piece was finished, I created a beaded rope using spiral rope stitch and embellishing the rope with a huge variety of freshwater perals, seed beads, and pressed glass leaves and flowers. After I attached the rope, I went back and added short fringes to the top and bottom of the piece. All said and done, she took me more than 40 hours to complete. I entered her in the Lake Placid Center for the Arts Annual Juried Adirondack Art Show, but she was not selected. (Oh, well, can't win 'em all!)

The Lady in the Lake is for sale on my website. While I am very attached to her, I would like to see her go to a good home.

Well, I can see I've got to get better about posting on this blog!

Ha! But it's been a busy week or two since I started this blog. I've had to get the museum ready for painting and to be winterized, line up a few jobs for the winter, and finish my instructions for Beadwork. And in between all that, I've been stitching up new ideas like mad! I love the creative energy that I feel lately when I sit down to work. Last night, we watched "Fight Club" while I tried to teach myself some new wire crochet techniques. Eventually, I gave up and just kept working on the cabs for the necklace. I may re-think that whole design until I get the wire crochet thing down better. In the meantime, there's always good old tubular Ndebele or peyote stitch with a wire through it, right?

Here is the photo of the second piece that Interweave is holding for consideration. I hope they publish it!



So, there's the jewelry part of the blog.

The life part is a little more (less?) interesting. Jill at the Adirondack Scenic Railroad suckered me into saying I would be the face-painter at their Halloween Train last Friday night. I was all set with my Harry Potter costume and everything, but by the time I was ready to head back into Lake Placid, the weather had just turned nasty. I got as far as Whiteface Mountain before I realized that between the snow, sleet and freezing rain, I was driving on ice-covered roads, and I was not anxious to make my way through Wilmington Notch on bald tires. I called Tom and told him I was turning around and coming home. "Good," he said. Instead, I spent the evening with him watching "Yellowbeard" and "Mars Attacks!" and re-organizing my jewelry studio with my brandy-new plastic cabinets! (Petroleum-based products that will last for the next 1,000 years in a landfill, I know, but they were cheap and convenient. >SIGH<)

More pics to come with new pieces!

Wow. My very own blog. Wow.

This is gonna be a little weird, at first, I think, so I'm just gonna jump right in and get to it!

Hello, World! This is MY BLOG!

So, where am I right now? Right now, I am sitting in my office at the Lake Placid North Elba Historical Society (my current day job), eating my lunch, and brainstorming for ideas that will boost my business so that I don't have to worry about having a day job. I've been thinking about starting a blog for quite a while, and I guess today is the day to do it.

Last week, I received my copy of Beadwork Magazine's 10th Anniversary "Best of Beadwork", and there was one of my designs, the "Victorian Infinity Necklace". Wow. I was just stunned to see my work alongside artists like Susan Lenart Kazmer and Margo Field. And it was the very first piece I ever sent to Beadwork Magazine. Since that first piece was published in 2005, I also had a second piece published in August of that year, and then beadwork just sent off contracts for a third piece. I've got another bracelet being held at their office while I whip up another one with some major design changes, and then I've got three more designs in the works that I will eventually submit to them. It's like, I get home and I just have to bead, bead, bead! It's not a bad thing, though. The ideas are terrible - they just come to me, usually at the most inconvenient time. Like thirty seconds before I fall asleep, or in that sleep-wake stage right before the alarm goes off every morning at 5:30. And then yesterday I got my latest order from Fire Mountain Gems with loads of new stuff for a NEW idea for a bracelet and earring set that I am just chomping at the bit to work up!

It's the ideas that really grab me. Sometimes I think that's my favorite part of the whole process. Sitting in a hot, scented bath with my sketchbook and a few books for light reading is usually when I get most of my best ideas.

It was cold this morning as I drove into Lake Placid. I mean, really cold. Winter cold. There was this huge storm on top of Whiteface Mountain as I drove through Wilmington, and then as I got into Lake Placid there was snow coming down. It was forty-two degrees outside, and it's been cloudy all day. But the best thing about the snow and the cold is our new kerosene monitor heater that Tom installed in the garage workshop with my torch! Yippee! No more torching in fourteen layers of clothing! No more hunching around the flame trying to keep my fingers from freezing stiff! We've finally got a reliable source of heat that doesn't create fumes and make my chest tighten up! Tonight, I am going to go home, eat some dinner, and finish cleaning my worktable in anticipation of a long, warm torching session on Monday. (In between everything else I need to do.)

I am also working on a few more embroidered collars to put into a new brochure to do a second mailing to fine craft galleries and shops. I don't think I made the impact I wanted to with my first brochure, so I am approaching the layout from a different angle. Designing brochures is fun, but I always second guess myself. I can be totally happy with the design when I send it to the publisher, but as soon as I get the printed product, I start to think, "Oh, I shouldn't have done it that way," and "Rats, I should have put different text under that photo." And in all likelihood, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the brochure at all.

The next juried art show at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts is going to be an elemental theme. You have to create a piece that embodies Earth, Fire, Water and/orAir, and the element you choose to portray needs to be obvious. I've got a few ideas swimming around, but nothing concrete yet. I've got to get a few of these other ideas out of the way before I can focus on that one, I think.

Next shows to work up pieces for are Beadwork's Beaded Bags juried show and Bead Dreams. I remember when Ruby came to my house for our last consult through the Northern Adirondack Trading Cooperative, I showed her the copies of the Bead Dreams special issues I have and told her about the competition. She said to me, "And why aren't there any of your pieces in here?" And truthfully, none of my pieces were in there because I never thought my stuff was good enough to enter. This year, though, I'm thinking differently.