I won

Tags

ABS, Art Bead Scene, bead, bracelet, challenge, etsy, freeform beading

I haven’t been able to keep up with my blog reading recently, but last night I realised it was a new month (yes it took me 6 days) so I headed over to the Art Beads Scene blog to see the new challenge and… Surprise! There was my bracelet as one of the randomly selected winners for June.

So instead of going to bed early like I was supposed to, I stayed up browsing Tesori Trovati’s Etsy shop. 🙂

*Happy Dance*

Speaking of Etsy shops… I am starting to move everything over to my Etsy shop. (Long/silly story… either it’s a new feature that I can list in GBP on Etsy or I just didn’t figure it out before.)

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52 Earrings – Complete

Tags

52 earrings, bead, challenge, earring, new year, polymer clay, style

At the start of 2012 I signed up for the 52 Earrings Challenge on Flickr. The idea was to make a pair of earrings every week for a year. Here is a thumbnail summary of what I did:

While I did manage to make more than 52 pairs of earrings, some were a bit late (or I would make the earrings and forget to upload them). At one point I stalled trying to think of a new style of earring to make until I decided that anything was better than nothing.

This caused me to realise something – for a few years now I have been waiting for “my style” to become evident, but when I work I keep trying to make things different to avoid sameness. Perhaps and artist’s “style” DEPENDS on an element of sameness, so I am preventing mine from developing?

All in all it was an enjoyable and worthwhile challenge. I particularly enjoyed the themes, and I would have liked to have made more of my earrings to fit them. Perhaps in 2013 I will challenge myself to make earrings for the themes I skipped?

Happy New Year! Whishing you all enjoyable and worthwile challenges for 2013.

52 Earrings Remojonation

Tags

52 earrings, bead, challenge, earring, earrings, handmade, malachite, polymer clay

So my blog has been pretty quiet as I’ve been feeling too exhausted to make anything new. I have been most distressed at missing the 52 Earrings Challenge as each week I’ve been reminded that yet again I’ve failed.

For some reason it felt like cheating to simply put beads onto a headpin to make earrings, so I was stalling. Finally on Wednesday I decided that it was better to make SOMETHING even if it wasn’t astoundingly innovative. It turns out that I have only missed 5 weeks of the Earring challenge, and I was able to make more than enough to catch up.

It feels good to have caught up, and hopefully I can keep up for the remaining 8 pairs of earrings. What? Only 8 weeks till the end of the year! 😮

Art Bead Scene Challenge – May

Tags

52 earrings, Art Bead Scene, bead, challenge, earring, MAY ABS, necklace, polymer clay

After missing the Art Bead Scene Monthly Challenge last month… AGAIN… I was determined to complete it this month, and I have! The idea of the challenge is to create a piece (jewellery or otherwise) incorporating at least one art bead inspired by a given piece of art.

Italian’s House at Monmarte by Maurice Utrillo
Oil on panel, 53 x 76 cm

I was most drawn to the piece of sky at the back with the contrast of the dusky sky and the dark green trees. I decided to make a hollow doughnut pendant and “paint” the trees on with polymer clay giving an impasto effect.

For stringing the pendant, I made green beads in the same colours as the trees, but I also wanted to make some reference to the architectural element of the inspiration painting. I had planned to make textured white cubes until it occurred to me that they would look like sugar cubes! At this point there was some cross pollination between the 52 Earrings Challenge (this week’s theme is “Faux”) and the idea of “ivory” squares came to me. Ivory beads seemed appropriate to me given the era of the painting.

The turquoise colour of the cord in the earrings came back to the necklace in the form of stone beads I salvaged from an old necklace. These picked up the blue colour of the sky and lightened the green shades which were rather heavy against the ivory.

Unfortunately I could not use the same cord to string the necklace as I did for the earrings as the holes in the stone beads were too small. I used gold ribbon instead which picked up the touches of yellow ochre in the trees. While I am happy with both the earrings and necklace separately I am not quite sure they make a SET – they are clearly related, but perhaps there is just a hint of sibling conflict?

April Challenges

Tags

52 earrings, beads, challenge, coloured pencil, earring, Gdansk, google maps, polymer clay, texture, travel, van alphen, Virtual Paintout

Or should this post be titled “Where did April go?” or “Things I didn’t make”?

I was very excited to discover the Virtual Paintout this month. The idea is that every month a new location is selected and you “walk” around the area using Google street view and find inspiration to paint. April’s destination was Gdansk in Poland. What a wonderful idea – it had never occurred to me before to use Google maps to be an armchair tourist! I started off a bit like a car-chasing-dog who has suddenly caught a bus – I didn’t know how to take it all in and I started clicking randomly all over the map (with not much success). Then I decided to pick a hotel and travel from there. I found a delightful house with a door intriguingly ajar. It looked so invitingly cool inside and  baking hot outside. Here is the location if you’d like to have a look around for yourself.

Doors open in Gdansk by Cate van Alphen

It’s been years since I did any drawing and I found it required a surprising amount of concentration, but I did enjoy myself (although next time perhaps I’ll choose something quicker to work with than coloured pencil and I’ll select an image which actually includes the focal point!).

“BUT WHERE’S THE POLYMER CLAY?” I hear you cry. Disappointingly nearly all of it is still in my head. I did manage to start on some texture stamps, but not any of the exciting things I had planned to make using them.

Then there are the architecturally inspired beads from the Royal Road I haven’t started yet…

I had a wonderful idea for the Art Bead Scene Challenge, but alas, on Saturday the 28th I discovered the deadline was the 25th!

Still, watch this space, some of these ideas may make an appearance eventually – one of the major culprits for my missing the challenge times is a bead that has been sitting in my “in progress” bucket for YEARS which suddenly demanded to be finished, and has grown up into something quite interesting. Sometimes these things have their own timescales.

Amazingly I HAVE managed to keep up with the 52 earrings challenge.