It's All About L O V E !

It's February, the month of L O V E ! !

Thought I'd share a new jewelry set that I made this past week with beads that I'm in LOVE with.  The combination still makes me happy.

I read a post recently by another jewelry maker who said she only makes jewelry when she's in a good mood so that it will bring happy feelings to the person who wears it.

I can so relate!  I was working on something last night and the wire was frustrating me, so I put it away for the day. 

Anyhooo, this is new and I love it!

Hope you do, too!

Happy February 1st!

Happily,

Laurel 
xoxo

Bead, Read, Eat and Need

I realized this morning that it's been a whole month since I last posted.  Time sure flies when you're having fun, and I have been having way too much fun lately. 

Thought I'd share what's on my table today, and it just so happened to rhyme:  Bead, Read and Eat.  Four words just works better, though, so I added one more since eat doesn't rhyme quite as well with bead and need.

BEAD:  I realized how much I love working with Amethyst, and how quickly it seems to sell.  I have nothing gorgeous in Amethyst in my finished jewelry inventory so the next few days I'll remedy that situation. 

Last night, while watching The Juror I made an Amethyst necklace and bracelet.  I wanted it to be all amethyst, but decided at the last minute to add the lavender freshwater pearls.  I'm still debating what kind of clasp to add.  I SO love the facetted coin shapped beads.

READ:  What I'm reading lately is Torch Fired Enamel Jewelry: A Workshop in Painting With Fire by Barbara Lewis.  I love the look of enamel, and since I don't have a kiln but I do have a torch, this method is one I could easily do.  As soon as I buy some enamels!  I have to admit that I'm not at all into the style of jewelry created in the projects section of this book.  But I have some of my own ideas of what I'd like to enamel and how I want it to look.  C-Coop makes gorgous jewelry components (and the owner lives in Duluth, Minnesota!) and I'd like to try my hand at making similar pieces like the pendant on the left. 

EAT:  Not really a healthy lunch, but I bought some Cheese Curls (or Cheesy Poofs, as Cartman calls them) the other day when I stopped at Cub for my Cappacino.  This is why grocery shopping while hungry is a bad idea.  Oh well, once in a while we have to eat something bad, right?  I love the Cappacino that comes in a red plastic container.  I'd have to go upstairs to read the label so I'll leave it at that.  The French Vanilla flavor is my favorite.  I love it because I can heat some water in the microwave and stir it in.  No fuss, and no cooking, is my motto these days.  Yesterday I had a breakfast bar for lunch.  Yes, I'm lazy.  Not sure when that happened, but I can't deny it.

NEED:  There are so many things I could write about under this heading.  There are so many things I should be doing, like cleaning the house and cooking a decent meal.  But should is not Need, is it?  Lately all I do is what I WANT to do.  Sounds like heaven, right?  Except that I don't think we were built to be so self-indulgent. 

I get nothing done during the day except washing a few loads of laundry.  I do have my sales tax ready to file, and just need to run a few reports to get my business income taxes done.  I spend too much time on the computer.  Everything I need to do relies on using the computer, but when I turn the computer on, it sucks my brains out.  Even the laundry sits in the washer or dryer for hours at a time. 

So what I need to do is write a task list for the week or day and make sure those items get done before I can take any time for what I want to do. 

Of course, I've made this resolution many times before.

My Jewelry Workspace

So I have a great craft room, right? 

Here's my craft room

But where do I make most of my jewelry?

In the family room on the love seat in front of the tv.

This is what my table looks like today.  Full of some of the beads I used in a piece I made last night.  The inspiration for the colors came from the C-Coop Enamel pendant.

Here's the necklace I just made.  I haven't decided if the chain strand will be a separate strand or will be connected to the bead strung strand.  The gold beads in the strung strand are amber, the rest are either glass or freshwater pearls.  The darker beads are glass pearls. 

Tonight's agenda is making matching earrings and a bracelet.

What do you think?

Laurel

Want vs Need

What do you do when you have dozens of things you need to do, and all you WANT to do is play? 


I want to be creative today. 


I want to try some new things with paper, watercolors and stamps.

Sometimes being creative is a need that can't be subdued no matter what else is on the list to be done.

Sometimes those practical endeavors must be tackled and you've put them off too long already.

So what do you do?

Do you promise yourself that you'll get to the fun stuff once you've completed one or two of those less than inspiring tasks?

Or do you ignore the mundane and go for the gold?

It depends, doesn't it? 

Today I'll tackle a few of the pressing must-do's and hope that there's time enough in the day to play.


Hope you have time for doing some of the things on your want list in the next few weeks.

Cheers!

Inspiration

Vintage Inspired Citrine and Carnelian Nuggets

Citrine and Carnelian are not stones I would normally highlight in my jewelry designs.

Yellow was my favorite color growing up because it was bright and cheerful.  The yellow walls in my teenager bedroom were offset by fairly dark olive green (shag!!) carpet, and my mom made me a quilt with yellow, olive green and orange rectangles.

Forty years later, that would be the LAST combination I would add to my interior design wish list. 

So what intrigued me about these particular stones?

• I LOVE the shapes; rough but with smooth facets, assymetrical and large in size. 
• Rugged and untamed, I knew they would make a statement, and lately I'm into making statement pieces. 
• The splash of orange tickled my fancy. 
• Vintage brass shed some warmth on the icy-looking Citrine
• They stood on their own with no need for crystals, pearls or glass.
• They were different from most everything else I've used in the past.

At the time I bought the Citrine nuggets, I also bought nuggets in Smokey Quartz and very light Amethyst of about the same size.  Normally I would have done something with the Amethyst nuggets first, but I had recently made a necklace with purple, olive green and yellow (Charoite, Swarovski crystals and Pineapple Quartz, a manmade glass), and I felt the pull of yellow like a sunbeam drawing me in with it's warmth.

The Carnelian beads are from a recent trip to Anoka to visit my friend and fellow artisan, Delayne. We stopped at The Garden of Beads on Main Street, where many new treasures decided they had to come home with me.  I love this beadstore; check it out here http://www.thegardenofbeads.com/  

The Carnelian beads are smoother and more polished than the Citrine, and seem to glow from within.  I only bought a few, though, so I had to use them sparingly.

Earthy, rugged and vintage have me in their grip right now, and I'm having fun.  Maybe I'm just designing with fall in mind. 

Now, to play with lemon chrysoprase and red, red coral!

Cheers!

Laurel

Creativity and Organization

I was just thinking about my jewelry making area which is in my family room.  I have a coffee table that has the mechanism to allow it to be lifted up so it's the perfect surface for laying out beads and making jewelry.  Like any self-respecting designer, I have containers of beads and findings all over the place.  Keeping them organized is always a struggle.  Some days I spend way too much time looking for specific things, and while I'm looking for one thing, I'll find 10 other items that were hidden away in a box that I pull out only to add to another box that goes on my couch, where I sit in the family room with growing piles of stone, pearl and glass beads, necessary findings and all kinds of metal pieces including beads, filigree, connectors, wire and what-nots in silver, gold, antique gold, copper, and now gunmetal.

Sometimes I think I'm drowning in stuff.

What does that have to do with creativity?  Everything!

I am always buying new stuff.  New stuff sparks my creativity.  I design by trial and error, which means laying out possibilities on my bead mat and stringing some of them together to see what feels right and what doesn't.  So having lots of choices is very important to my design process.  Based on what I've tried, I get ideas on things that aren't on my design mat and I have to go searching for specific stones or pearls or glass or metal.  Because I can't have it ALL sitting on the couch next me.  At least not at first....

Most of my bead stash is in my "work room" which is adjacent to the family room.  My work room also has my computer, two desks, printer, paper, stamps, cutting area, ribbons, stamps, watercolor paints, stamps, paper, clay, books, magazines, paper, stamps, beads, glass, metal, wire, books, yarn, stones, and did I mention I also have stamps?

This is the room in which I take my photos for my on-line store, where I make greeting cards, book marks and refridgerator magnets, where I stamp metal, enter my beads and findings in my database, process credit card sales on-line, edit my photos, print my jewelry tags, write my blog and keep in touch with family and friends via e-mail and facebook. 

So not only is my work room an organized mess, but so is my family room.  Let's not even go into the spare bedroom where I store all of my craft show things like the shutters, table cloths, jewelry display busts, lights, boxes, earring turn-arounds and jewelry that is priced and tagged and ready to sell. 

I could also mention the accumulation of sales books, checking account statements, receipts from purchasing beads and supplies, credit card statements and other business related paperwork that are stored in my work room that need to be organized so I can enter them into Quickbooks so it will calculate how much money I owe the state for Sales Tax.  I file yearly on February 5th, and I've entered nothing in my accounting database since last February.

There comes a point when the clutter becomes a mountain that looms above me and threatens to spill its guts all over the place like a volcano spewing lava.  When Too Much Stuff becomes Detrimental to Creativity.

I think I see hot red magma swallowing up the floor!

Good thing I can be creative in the family room tonight!

Tomorrow I'll worry about taming the chaos.

Cheers!
Laurel

The Hard Questions

What do I want to be?  And where did the day go?
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron is a book I was familiar with from my days as a writer.  I bought the book many years ago but never did the morning pages or any of the exercises that are supposed to help you get unblocked and become more creative.  Last week I checked it out of the library.

Since being laid off from my day job in early December, I've struggled with the most difficult of questions:  "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?"  Having been a capable mainframe programmer and database administrator, I am now obsolete.  For the second time in my career.  I need to work for another 15 years, but I'm not sure I want to jump in to the technology pool and try it again.

This morning, I wrote my three morning pages as required by the book The Artist's Way despite my writing hand alternating between falling asleep and cramps.  Writing the pages by hand puts you in touch with your subconscious mind.  You aren't supposed to edit your words or think too much about what you want to say because it's supposed to be a stream of consciousness thing.  With morning pages, it doesn't matter what you write, as long as you write three pages fast.  There are exercises for each week (12 weeks in all) that I haven't started yet, but I have read them and they are in the back of my mind.  The focus of the first week is "Recovering a sense of safety"; what attitudes and core beliefs might be hindering my inner artist child from feeling safe.  Like when a parent has said, "You can't make a living as a writer; you need a REAL job to pay the bills!"

A REAL job.

When I think back on my work life over the past 12 years, I know I started out happy and effective and full of positive energy.  I'm an oldest child and was always the star performer, especially at work.  I'm not sure when that changed.  In the past couple of years, I had become moody, frustrated, jealous, angry, unhappy, abandoned.  My future prospects had gone down the drain with the mainframe computer. 

Yesterday I ran errands:  post office, library and bead store.  When I got to the post office, I discovered I had left the bills on the kitchen counter at home.  At the library, I picked up a book on chip carving for my Dad, and browsed through a few shelves for myself.  I picked out more books on marketing and crafting as a business.  My last errand was to get the 2011 midwest arts and craft fair guide which I expected to find at the local bead store.  They don't carry it, but I managed to find a couple of things I didn't know I needed instead.  I also chit-chatted with the clerk: what classes did she teach, where does she sell her jewelry, blah, blah, blah.

When did I become such an extrovert?  The clerk's eyes glazed over more than once. 
However, if I hadn't been in such a chatty mood, I wouldn't have learned that the store might need someone to teach a seed bead-weaving class this summer.  I left my card.  I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed teaching beading since I haven't done it for a few years.  Thinking about it today I realized a bracelet I designed would be the perfect project for a beginners class in Peyote stitch.

The Artist's Way has a subtitle that says "A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity." 

Maybe I'm on my way....

Cheers!