6 posts tagged “jewelry”
In honor of Bastille Day, show us something French.
I bought this brooch whilst out visiting castles in the Loire Valley in 1989.
For my upcoming birthday, Pax gave me a "Buy Me That" Moment at the street fair we happened upon in Durango the other day. I had been oohing and aahing over the assorted baubles at the Forest Lampworking booth, and I finally decided on this beautiful pendant:
And then Pax also bought me a tomato plant. I've always found store-bought tomatoes disappointing, and the salmonella outbreak has me determined to grow my own. So, how long does it take for a tomato to grow from this point?
Yes, really, the teacher for the jewellery class I took last week is called Jinx. Jinx Bolli, but in a recent arts feature, the local paper lopped off her last name, so I guess that elevates her to celebrity status, like Cher or Jewel. Anyway, I was one of about 14 people who showed up at SJC East for six hours of mangling glass and wire into something pretty to wear. Here's what I came up with:
This is my very first attempt.
Then I did this rectangular piece. I honestly don't remember putting a clear layer on top for a full fuse, though. The clear layer was a smidge small, actually, so if you look closely at it, you can tell it didn't fuse completely. Even with a groove ground in, this was a bitch to wrap with the copper wire. I will probably re-wrap it with silver wire, but I'm not looking forward to the struggle.
Somebody had already cut a piece of aqua-blue base glass into a diamond shape, so I snagged it for another tack-fuse pendant. I was delighted to get it home and discover that it perfectly matches a cute outfit I just bought.
And this is the final piece I made during class. I had started with the idea of making the silver piece in the shape of a heart, but I had a hard enough time cutting itty-bitty pieces of dichroic glass in any shape, so I quickly abandoned that concept. The fuse on this isn't perfect, but at least the little dimples don't show when I'm wearing the pendant. I'll definitely re-wrap this one in silver, but I'm a little disappointed because I liked how the copper curlicues turned out.
Jinx is doing an extension of the class next month, for those of us who didn't get enough this time. I hope I can fit it into my schedule.
Show us a souvenir from a memorable trip.
This was the result of a "Buy Me That" Moment in Santa Fe. It was a very short vacation for no particular reason other than that I'd lived in New Mexico for a while and hadn't visited Santa Fe yet. So we wandered around downtown taking pictures and doing a bit of shopping.
This was from a BMTM in Las Cruces, just over a year ago. One morning we went to the open air market, which was a lot of fun.
More recently, I went to Phoenix (alone, alas, with nobody to BMT) for a training conference. I'm not entirely sure why, but at the conference registration table, they were giving away these heart-shaped keyfobs. (No, it was not a cardiology conference.)
This was a brooch I bought for myself while going to school in Tours, France. On the weekends, my host family would take me around to visit castles and such. All in all, a really neat experience.
The owl medallion is a souvenir from Islands of Adventure in Orlando. We only got to spend one day at the theme park, but we were in Florida for the entire week. We went to a fantasy/sf con, we did an airboat ride, we took the expensive tour of Cape Canaveral...I still consider that trip the most enjoyable consecutive 7 days of my entire life.
Here is the result of my most recent "buy me that" moment.
I believe every female is entitled to the occasional bmtm. It doesn't matter if she is perfectly capable of taking the item to the cashier and plunking down the cash (or modern equivalent) herself.There are certain pretty shiny objects that require the woman to point and issue the command "Buy me that." (And it is utterly irrelevant that her money and the buyer's money come from exactly the same place.)
This particular bmtm occured in Santa Fe's Overland store Saturday night. Really, when you think of the potential for financial ruin that an Overland bmtm poses, I believe I exercised admirable restraint.
