July/August Projects

Besides going to Summer movies, reading books and collecting seeds from my "mutant" marigolds, I'm doing the occasional jewelry project. 

These two bracelets are made with copper wire in silver and bright copper finishes. The beads used are pyrite, hematite, goldstone, copper and glass.

 

This is a Mixed Media necklace or sun catcher made with assorted glass and handmade beads and a replica skeleton key pendant also embellished with beads and wire.

 

This is another heavier bracelet made with copper wire, pyrite, copper, and black stone beads.

 

This bracelet started out as a chain making experiment. I used the same chain making shape you see in the simple chain below but added small beads to each link before I closed the loop. All the beads are glass and the wire is silver finished copper.

A simple handmade chain link bracelet. Charms could easily be added to these links to make a more elaborate bracelet.

 

This was just a quick little "I'm bored" project using up some odd colored marble beads.

That's all the jewelry I've made so far this summer.  I have ideas and plans for other wire and bead projects, not just bracelets. They are all written down, some of them sketched, and I'm sure to get to many of them eventually.

I've barely done any drawing this year so I took a break from whatever else I was doing and sketched a little imaginary butterfly. I love drawing butterflies and I've casually studied the variety of the wing patterns and markings in my Butterfly encyclopedias. The wing shape and marking pattern in the drawing below are from a real species but the color is made up. I only need to sketch half a butterfly because then I go to Photoshop and play with that to create the digital pictures you see below.

 

 

That's all the crafts I've done this Summer. I feel like Fall is already here but most of my flowers are still blooming. Maybe next time I write the story of my "mutant" marigolds.

May/June Update 2 (plus July)

Well, it's the middle of July and I'm still writing about May and June. Oh Well. Actually, not a lot of writing. Mostly pictures of the jewelry I have been making when I wasn't reading a book or watching all eight seasons of Supernatural on Netflix! I honestly did not expect to like that TV show, who knew? Anyway, this is what I have finished in the last 2 1/2 months:

 

 

 

Oh, and I forgot I have also been working on some quilted/embroidered pieces for as yet undetermined future uses. I may use them for soft handmade book covers, coasters, little keepsake bags, pencil cases, mini wall hangings, etc. Not sure. I sit and work on them when I watch TV and as they stack up I think about what I might make with them.

 

 

May/June Update 1

My craft activities have been hit and miss the last couple months and somehow I never got around to posting anything about them, but I have been doing a few things.  I finally finished a set of four Butterfly collages that I started sometime in 2012. 

As I worked on each collage I improved on the processed I used and was happier with each completed piece. After I finished this set of four, I decided to continue working on this theme idea and prepared four more background canvases for more Butterfly collages.  These backgrounds are again collage on canvas but with paper and paint instead of fabric and paint. I plan to make the butterflies again out of fabric collage layers. 

 

I'm not sure when I'll get around to finishing this second set of collages. Hopefully, it won't be another year from now, but I'll be sure to post something when I complete them.

 

Bracelets

The world is finally green again and I am working a a few different projects. Spring gardening, some quilted fabric patchwork projects, some butterfly collages I started last year, and more wire and bead practice. I have been making some beads out of wire and paper, wire and fabric or just wire. It's all part of my learning and experimental process. I want to embellish some other projects like handmade books or mixed media wall art with bead and wire. I'd also like to make bookmarks, purse charms or key charms. Currently I am making a variety of different bracelets as practice and shown below from newest to oldest.

This bracelet is copper wire and chain with sodalite chips, red coral beads, and red river stone beads:

A bracelet of copper, readline marble beads , and goldstone chip beads:

 

In this is bracelet I used some homemade beads I made from denim or dark blue fabric or denim fabric threads. The fabric beads are wire wrapped with natural and red copper wire. The red bead chips are semi-precious and the butterfly is red stone:

 

These are a few of the bead making experiments I have done.

Variations using pieces of old denin:

Map paper wire wrapped beads:

And assorted wire and bead links:

Finally, I also tried using galvanized steel wire from the hardware store with simple blue glass chips and red glass beads:

 

New Tree of Life

After using up 25 feet of copper wire making the chain in my last post I finally got back to this little project. I experimented combining different gauge and color wire in this piece.

 

Making Chain

I've been practicing making chain from cheap copper wire I got at the hardware store. I love how it is coming out, the weight and feel of it. But I am still perfecting my technique making the links. This I how it looks so far:

This is how the links look. I join them into the chain with two jump rings.

Wire and Bead Experiments

This no longer exists because after finishing it and admiring it for a couple days I decided I wasn't satisfied with it and took it apart. The first problem was that it was too long. When I was making the individual strands I forgot to account for the length of the closure, that I hadn't actually made yet, so I didn't know how long it would be. 

 

The second problem was I didn't like how the center beaded link looked and decided to take it out completely.

 

And finally I decided I would rather use the handmade green bead chain in some other project instead of in this bracelet.  But I learned a few more things along the way and that just makes the next project potentially better.