The Blizzard Of '09

We had a white Christmas this year. The snow was lovely, if a bit deep. This is what we found when opening the front door about 4 :00 Christmas Eve. The snow was still falling and had blown up onto the front door and drifted in the entry way.

We hope that you have enjoyed your holidays with the ones that you love and the ones that love you.

Tonight I'm playing in clay, developing some new techniques for classes and wondering "What if????".

Inspired by hand made jewelry on the web and the beauty of ribbon embroidery, the next project will either be called "Sliver flowers" or "Faux Ribbon Embroidery". Note the first name is SLIVER, as in a sliver of pie; not SILVER, as in silver and gold.

The flowers and leaves are tiny slivers of clay that are gently rolled to shape. When finished, it reminded me of silk ribbon embroidery where many of the shapes are tiny slivers of ribbon, shaped by the stitchery. We'll see. You will hear it here.

The first pendant was done in pastels and posted on my flickr site. It was posted on Etsy, but was lost in the huge pool of lovely products.

The pendant reminded me of the slightly puffy look of ribbon embroidery.

The next attempt was to make another pendant with a different feeling.

I learned more about beading at a guild field trip to a beading store. This pendant has a jade necklace with tiny gold tone seed beads, AB glass beads, two lavender beads whose names I have forgotten and gold tone spacers.

The background is faux ivory, but looks more like faux wood. Maybe not a good choice. Also used are iron on crystals and some wire work.

I'm still learning something about jewelry every day it seems. This necklace is a favorite so far. It took four attempts to get a pattern in the beadwork that I liked. First it was too dull, then the lavender beads were too far from the pendant, then it needed spacers, still to dull out came the sparkly AB glass beads. Finally! a necklace I was proud of.

The earrings are in progress.

Just for fun, I experimented on different bits of clay, like ribbons to make this little wisteria pendant.

The clays used are both translucent and opaque. The tiny eye pins along the bottom are from Rio Grande. They have tiny ridges that allow them to be inserted before baking, and when gently pressed from the front or back, will not come out after baking.

The pendant is only about 3/4" tall without the eye pins and pale pink drops.

Have fun and I hope you have lots of time to create and play.