Pretties!

I have some new pretties to show you.

Here's all of them plus a few others, all at once!  I love to display them in this way, it's so sumptuous, and it's a great way to use my Assuit scarf as a prop.

This is the big momma of the clutch.  An altered and be-dangled Turkoman pendant, with the addition of a pyrite, smokey quartz, pearl, glass and crystal necklace.

One of two hematite scarf clip necklaces.  On both I couldn't resist adding extra dangles and the one above is a mixture of apatite and labradorite and other sea-green stones.

This one, although similar has coins and fluorites, kyanites and glass.

A sparkling brooch as the main accent.

Metal, labradorite, smokey quartz, pyrite, glass, freshwater pearls.

Titaniumm doused points and matching rondelles with copper.  This one is reserved already.

A serene Buddha pendant with a mixture of light tones beads.

My absolute favourite was quite rightly put on reserve.  This piece is 6 pieces combined and it is soooo sparkly it's almost a crime.

All of these pieces are up on my FB page at the moment, and you should snap one up whilst you're there as once I do the extra edits needed and they're up on my website the price will increase by a teeny bit.

Silver Linings

When the world is grey what I need is a little sunshine.

There you go, in these dark and dingy and rainy days you need a little blue sky.  Well I do, just for a while.

Hopefully, if I've any photographic skill (I use that term loosely) at all, it''s in finding a moment when it looks as though there was no-one else there at all.  

This is as good as I can get for the photo of the bay....

No it's not!

This is on the evening we took the kids down to the beach (me and the other singlies) and let them play in the water until dark-o-clock.

Hello to the couple who were quite happily swimming alone until we let our monsters in.

Anyway, I'm already looking forward to our holiday this year in exactly that place.

Happy New Year

As it's a shockingly long time since I last posted I think I'll just skip that section of my life last year and say, "I had a creative block."

My creative juices have started to flow again and for a while I'm just going to play around with some ideas and techniques and see what comes of it.  It's been such a long time since I was creative just for the hell of it I need some time to just see how creative I can be.  I have to get ma groove on ya know?

For the longest time I have loved the shape of ammonites and spirals and circles and how they sit next to squares and oblongs and such when it comes to shape and interplay.  I have some clay texture plates in my kitchen that I made at school when I was 14.  Even now they resonate with me, and I can see me in my work.

Blogger pulled that one in sideways.....

You should understand something about me - in all creative endeavours since school I am self-taught.  Ok, I look at books and now have the Net but ever since I've done anything I've just had a go and gotten on with it.  Plus I'm very visual and in the last few months I've been really busy with a new job, so much so that I haven't fed my soul with any visual loveliness.  As Christmas was upon us last week I used it as an excuse to buy some coffee table books - Art Deco illustrations, Art Nouveau illustrations and interiors and deep space.  And a beading book.  I'd forgotten how much I love pictures and how inspiring they can be.  Looking at things on Pinterest doesn't have the same spark as looking through a book and being able to go back to the photo or illustration.

So in the last 5 days I have come up with some new projects (all of which need me to be able to use what's already in the house):

~ Make some Klimt influenced jewellery pieces.  A choker is my first project as I adore his portraits of women when they are wearing throat encasing chokers.  I should also add that I'll be adding my love of spirals/straight lines aesthetic so they're not Klimt copies per se, just influenced by his work.  And I'll be using a silver and copper colour palette just to get away from the gold thing.

Here's a shot of my set up so far.  You'll have to excuse the colours, it's night-time here and in my kitchen everything looks muted, although to be fair these are quite muted colours.  The fabric being used was cut from faux suede blinds about 6 years ago.  It's good for beading on as it doesn't fray and it has a vinyl backing.  It is wrinkled but I kind of like that about it, it's another texture.

I've set out the length and width with tape, and this will help to sew in a straight line - much better than a drawn line.  I might change the shape yet.  Or maybe I won't, I quite like a broad choker and the ends of this will sit just behind the ears.  I've played with a basic focal structure; a piece of etched copper (I may etch new ones yet, I'm just playing, and the etch on this one isn't right...or maybe it is....we'll see), some faceted "stones", brass stampings and some rhinestone.  I don't want to fill the rest of the space with edge to edge beading, I want to have some negative space, so I may emboss some markings onto the fabric backing that I should be able to sew through fairly easily. As I use PVA glue as my bonding agent for the embossing powder there's potential for the needle to get sticky so I'll have to ponder a little more and then just get on with it.  I figure if I can try and predict where beading will look best I can emboss in the spaces and then see what happens.

The beading and other things that might get added will be in silver (clear beads with silver inside), copper, dark and copperish brown and all manner of things that I may or may not add as they occur to me.  I may even make some copper squares as I'm not loving the brass.  At the moment though I'm just playing with shapes.  

~ Embroider a nebula or a galaxy.  This is something I have longed to do for some time and in searching for fabrics to help me on my way I found some of my earliest attempts at mixed media bead embroidery.  It wasn't called that at the time but I can recall the day I looked at the book that contained some work that blew me away.  I'll wait for some good light to photograph those pieces because it's dark and dreary here at the moment.  I have to step up my game for the galaxy piece or I'll end up producing something that I'm unhappy with, or glorky looking (see below).  The book is full of awesome photographs so there's a lot of inspiration there, and I love the way different filters get used to highlight different areas within galaxies and nebulae.

~ Use some crystals in my possession to create some pieces.  Without them looking too glorky....you know what glorky looks like?  It's kind of nice but a bit mundane.  I'm sure they'll start out glorky but I aim to move on from that.

~  Try out some beading techniques advocated by Sherry Serafini, even though I don't always love her work I adore it - does that make sense?  And how ironic is it that I just gave you a link to a Pinterest board of her work?  Beadwork.  This is what's leaking into the Klimt influenced pieces too.

Part of the process for this kind of project is all about finding a way to keep all of my ideas and supplies easily to hand.  When I have a commercial project to do I put it all in a very useful and basic plastic container.  It's wide and deep enough to hold a lot of "stuff" and it's practical.

This project though is gorgeous before it starts.  On returning to the source of the books I had bought to get one that I didn't think I needed (which it turns out I really did) I spied an Art Nouveau influenced tray so I bought that too.  Again it's sideways and I can't sort that out...

Into this I have placed a slightly cut down Christmas selection box inside (the kids had so much chocolate this year they don't know that they have another 3 selection boxes each).

Once I start to weed out what are day-to-day items I will need somewhere else to put the "ideas" and they will go into a tin I've been saving and found again in the last few days.

Sideways Mucha is still good Mucha.

There's nothing in the tin as yet, but it's there when I need it to be.

And that?  That's just a gratuitous picture of my "proper" sewing box.

Happy New Year to you all. 

And relax.....

Over the last couple of days I've done lots and lots of making.  How so?  Well, one of my constant dilemmas is that I don't have a set workspace, but for the most part I have tools and some materials in the kitchen and everything else lives in the cupboard under the stairs in the living room so I can sit on the sofa and watch TV or listen to music as I'm playing around.  I keep wondering how easy or not it would be to make myself a workroom in one of the bedrooms whilst the children are still young enough to share.  But I keep feeling as though that's really over-indulgent of me (I prefer to be around for the kids and I do a lot of making at night when they are in bed) plus I like pottering in the kitchen and sitting on the sofa when I'm making.  Anyway, I cleared some more space in the kitchen and as a result got lots done whilst the kids were playing.

First up I had a revelation.  I can't wear earrings as everything makes my lobes itch like crazy (ok, so I've not yet tried titanium or gold but I'll get around to trying them sometime).  Anyhow, I thought I'd have a go at making some ear cuffs out of some bits of copper I had etched.

This is they before they've been liver of sulphured. They're kind of cute and I plan to add a couple of dangles to one or two of them before I take some proper pics and get them up in the shop.  And obviously I'm wearing a couple of them all the time.  Have you ever tried getting a picture of your own ear?  Seriously hard to do.

Next up - earlier in the week I read on Beatnheart's blog about a polymer clay tutorial sold by Ginger Davis-Allman in her Blue Bottle Tree Etsy shop.  I was suitably impressed and so bought it and this weekend was the first time I'd had a chance to play around.  I didn't make many bits and bobs but here's the outcome.

I don't know why this pic is sideways - blogger won't let me turn it around.  I have a couple of pieces of ammonite, one fossil and one piece of rock where an ammonite was extracted so I used them to texture three pieces of clay.  I love ammonites.  These aren't done yet in terms of being painted/finished but they're getting there.  I'm quite pleased with them.

These three pieces were textured with a couple of old belt medallions.  Yes, the colours on all of them are pretty similar so I'm going to have to do way more experimenting with different colours but my brain gets stuck into a green-ish purple place more often than not.  More on that later.

Some pods.  I quite like the pods, I just need to use them all now.

I made another bangle stack. These are probably for me.  I'm going on holiday with the kids next week and realised that I don't often wear jewellery so i figured I should make something that will go with mostly everything I have.  Again, the groove is a neutral pinkish/purple/green/black/metal thing going on.  Dinge.  I like dinge, it goes with a lot of things.

Some necklaces - etched copper, a Buddha pendant (left as-is, for now) and a key assemblage piece.

Some earrings using etched copper and beads, etched copper ammonite (again) that's a bracelet. 

Another sideways one.  This was my experiment in making those bright shiny Buddha cases look aged and grungy.  I've a couple more of these somewhere so I shall grunge them up too.  But my experiment was fun - I used gesso, alcohol inks, embossing powder and my heat gun.  My heat gun nearly killed the whole thing because these cases are made of plastic.  There's no metal or glass in these at all (although the Buddha's themselves are stone).  But the heat-gun made the clear cover go all warpy but in the end didn't do too much damage.

Then because I was playing with embossing powder I decided to try and add some silver dots to the pods - I love when bead artists do this with real silver on glass beads.  I think my technique needs some refinement (as in, not doing it when I'm cooking tea for the kids) but I'm liking this a lot.  In fact I've realised that all I need is to keep hold of a felt-tip pen that's lost its juice and I can use that to dab the ink or the PVA glue on.

In the meantime the postman came and delivered these babies!  Wowsers.  These are a lot bigger than I thought they'd be, even from the description that was given.  Excellent.  And yes, they are that purple, greenish. goldish colour again.  I've decided to stop trying to get away from it and just go over-board with the purple green gold thing.  Once I get it out of my system I might be able to do other colours.  

Funnily enough my current costume commission has been from someone who wants a fusion belly dance costume in, you guessed it, purple and green.  She might find herself with some crystals on it.

So all I've got to do now is settle in and get some jewellery made.

And to finish?  In amongst all of this my 4-year-old geek son wanted me to find the teeny tiny sonic screw-driver for his teeny tiny Dr Who and friend.  I'm sure you can imagine how easy it is to lose them?  Anyhow, what can I do?  I dug a lolly stick (the rolled paper kind) out of the drawer (I keep them at the moment because you can make light-sabers for teeny tiny Star Wars figures....) and using the kids felt pens made a new sonic for the 11th Dr.  My son did a 10th Dr version for the 11th Dr's friend.

Men at work.  Best not get in the way.

Mojo? Where are you?

Ok, probably my problem is that I am not as creative as I would like to think I am.  But this isn't some "poor me" fest, it's a proper, "What am I doing with my life?" questioning period.

As a belly dance teacher and performer I am questioning everything at the moment.  I have a niche that I should probably run into head-long but as usual I am questioning my ability in this very niche area (I'm mainly rubbish at self-promotion) but I'm beginning to understand that it IS something I should do and be more proactive about.

Other creative areas in my life are making costumes for fusion belly dancers and making eclectic and experimental (for me) jewellery.  I'm at a hiatus with both but try and push myself with the jewellery making and keep getting custom work coming in so I have to keep going or my brain will explode (and so will my house as there's no room to keep everything).

In a bizarre head-rush of fusion this week there were two posts from belly dance costume design crushes of mine about, 1) copying styles and how crap that is and, 2) offering tutorials which free you up, give you licence to use what you've learned to make things you can sell as your own and how that might influence your own path.

When discussions of this type start I am always brought back to a blog post by someone who influences a great many jewellery makers, Marina Rios, aka Fanciful Devices.

More recently this worldwide discussion relates to me buying a tutorial about making polymer clay pieces and focals.   A great many jewellery designers and makers seem to have come across this tutorial and have sucked in every iota of information that was expressed, and i'm sure that they were as greatful as I was to have it all so clearly explained.

Today there was a post on FB in a group I'm in (Tribal Fusion Bellydance UK) about cultural appropriation and the discussion that followed was about how we all felt about throwing things into the mix.  Should we use markers from other cultures that we love because they look beautiful to our eyes or should we only build in a personal story about how we cannot add these because it is inappropriate, even to people who will now gift us or sell us those markers? (Saris and bindis being the bigger players in these stories).  This is a difficult subject to approach because amongst other trades the Silk Route and the Spice Trade both brought benefits to the cultures they came from, and to the cultures they arrived at.  In the same theme should assemblage jewellery makers use religious medals, crosses and sacred beads in their work?  If a jewellery designer understands the cultural mix that is implicated by using elements from a different culture and yet comes from a country and was brought up in a culture that uses images and symbols that are both important and common but that they have decided not to assign a meaning, does this make their work art or the bastardisation of entitlement?

Within this mix I always come back to the most influential blog post by the inspired jewellery maker Marina Rios/Fanciful Devices who thoroughly encourages people to copy her as she understands that it is by copying and then by experimenting after copying that one finds ones own space.  She understands, and knows from sales, that her skill is never really hit by anyone who tries to copy her outright.

Should we copy someone we admire?  Should we, can we copy from a person or a culture that we admire and aspire to emulate?  Does it inspire us or constrain us?

Been away too long...

...and I have nothing to show you.

I'm not sure that I'll ever have anything to show ever again but I'm going to try.  It's hard not to get caught up in the day-to-day stuff of life, particularly with small children who still need me to be around, but each day I get a little more time.  Sadly I seem to be getting lazier.  The summer we've been having so far has been pretty awesome, so I can't blame drizzle and grey skies for my feelings of sadness and my lack of mojo.

No pressure.  Let's see what happens

Mojo Rising

Yay!  Remember that job interview I went for?  I was offered the post so am a very happy bunny indeed.  It ticks the boxes for me in all sorts of ways, not least in that it's a term-time job (so no mega-expensive holiday child-care to pay out for) and part-time so that if my hours do run over school-pick up time the kids can go to the after-school club across the road a couple of afternoons a week, and I can still do my self-employed dance teaching and creative making.

The other thing it has done for me is it's unleashed a corner of creativity again.  Once I'm working for someone else later this summer (references pending!) I won't have to rely on the creativity money so much, and so my god-awful selling skills won't be tested to their outer limits on a daily basis.  If it sells it sells and if it doesn't...well....that's a consideration for another time.

Quite often when making something I err on the side of affordability for the potential customer, but this often translates to something mundane to my eye.  After all, the higher the cost of the components the higher the overall cost of the item.  Not that a lot of my components are in and of themselves expensive (well, some are but I try and collect things as economically as possible) but once you start stacking them up it's surprising how much you can rack up onto one costume piece.  However, this particular mind-constraint left me at the weekend.  this was going to be opulent and to hell with the cost.

Saturday should have seen me at a craft fair but on waking up at 6.30am on Saturday the very last thing I felt like doing was going to a craft fair where no-one was going to buy anything from me.  Occasionally I've made back my stall fee, sometimes made back my stall fee and my travel costs, and on other occasions done rather better than that but I was conscious that more more conservative items had all recently sold and that it was unlikely that I would do more than chat all day and interestingly I didn't feel like chatting, I felt like doing.  I got as far as making my packed lunch for the day before finally deciding that sometimes I'm allowed to change my mind.

Feeling somewhat guilty I contacted the fair organiser and explained my absence (and apologised but to be fair she had had my stall fee in advance) and then decided to pull out all of my fabrics and jewellery and bits and bobs and see what could be divvied up into things to keep and things to sell online or at the belly dance events I'll still be attending as a vendor, as I generally do well when I'm with the sparkly people.

But it didn't work out that way......after finding a section of gold net with beautiful ornate embroidered bullion work and sequins......not a large piece, only around 25cm by 20cm at it's widest point.....I pondered what to do with it.  The realisation was that I should put my big girl pants on and cut it up if it was going to get any use at all as I wanted to turn it into a tribal fusion belly dance belt.

I'll spare you the blow by blow account of what and why and cut to the pics...... (p.s. if you want the blow by blow then chuck me a message and I'll explain it to you).

So, here's where it was at after about 6 hours of sewing.  But it just didn't feel right.....it needed some extra va va voom........

                           

Tassels were made from some cute bead caps I had made by cutting up a big old metal bead with my super strong craft scissors  (love them so much, they cut through thinnish sheet metal like a dream) and using some Egyptian bead fringe from the stash made some tassels.  To make sure the tassels were secure I used tiger-tail rather than thread and sewed it up through the tassel, through the bead cap, up through the beads, into the fabric and inner layer of the belt and then back down again before crimping it securely in place.

Here's a close up of the bullion and embroidery work.  Although it's a scary thing to cut through (omigod will it all fall apart!?) previous experience told me a few beads will shed from this stuff but it is so resilient it can withstand it and it was all firmly sewed into place on the brocade backing before adding the extra embellishments.

Once upon a time I would have used just one element across the top or bottom section but these days it's so much more satisfying to play around a bit and for this one used combinations of old Turkoman buttons, new metal stampings, shells, chandelier beads, and use some silver ric-rac to thread the Turkoman buttons and tribal coins onto......in fact this is still very symmetrical so the next challenge is to do take inspiration from my opulent headdresses and make them "balanced" but not symmetrical.  After pulling out my stash of vintage brooches I found two big golden star/flower shaped ones and popped those on for some extra impact.

This pic makes me feel slightly woozy but only because blogger won't let me turn it around...... those chandelier beads?  All vintage..... in fact quite a lot of the components are vintage and have been waiting to be used on something as opulent and decadent as this.  Looking at where the net is sewn to the base I think it may need some more love, a scattering of vintage rhinestones might stop me from wincing when looking at it.

See that big sparkly thing by the ring at the end?  That's a button!  There's another at the other end too.  They are hugely heavy and I can't begin to imagine what they were on originally - maybe a coat?

These clear acrylic buttons are also vintage.

Here's the whole shebang but obviously you can't see the detail....hence the picture fest.....

And here's another close up of the gorgeous embroidery work - at the top there is a bracelet bought at least 5 years ago that's been waiting to be used - I can date it because I remember being pregnant with my youngest and he's just coming up for 5 years old.  The glue on the bracelet gave the big stones a yellowish hue, which annoyed me initially but being a magpie couldn't get rid of it and it turned out to be perfect for this gold and silver combination.  In the end there was about 8 hours work on this and there may well be a few more tweaks till happiness sets in completely.

Now what's needed is to do is use up the rest of the net and the bullion/embroidery work.  There's an edge section left that will make a great edge on a bra, plus there's enough gold net to cover a bra too as the groundwork for more embellishment.  And there should be just enough bits and bobs of embroidery left to make a headdress that "matches" although I don't really enjoy making matchy matching things.....

Also tucked away in my stash is some even more amazing bullion work on a red fabric so you should look out for a red and gold version of this, there's a black shalwar kameez that has black and silver leaf and stem embroidery that will make cool set, and work is ongoing on a blue chiffon base/gold and pink embroidery costume that's properly for myself.  Properly because if these babies don't sell then they're all mine aren't they?

It's not up for sale in the shop yet but I'm willing to sell this beauty for £120 - she measures about 3" deep and is 40" long from D-ring to D-rind and can be tied in place with a scarf or other fabric.  Feel free to message me if you're interested.

Ch ch ch changes......?

It's been more than a month since I made my last, slightly depressed, blog post so I thought I ought to do a quick catch up.

I've been making some necklaces recently......  one of them sold within minutes of me putting the pics up on Facebook and another one sold the next day at an event I was at so yay!

This is one that sold......

this is still available.....

so is this one......

and so is this headdress......

I have more headdresses to make and I've made two more necklaces tonight but I can't get pics cos my camera battery is dead - I'm such a numpty. 

But my biggest news is about a real life job.  Now.  I know.  You're scratching your head and wondering why on earth I might be seeking out a real life job when I could just carry on being a starving artist.  Guess what?  I hate being a starving artist, I have me and two kids to look after and some weeks it's just too stressful.

So I need a real life job.  I'll not bore you with the ins and outs of life as a single parent (trust me, I never ever imagined I would be a parent let alone a single parent at age 46) but my life would be made a little easier if I could find a part-time job that I could do alongside my part-time self employed hours.  

This week I had an interview for a job that I'm pretty sure I could do well.  Fingers crossed eh?  

Quiet Times.....

Since my last post I've been reflecting, feeling anxious and hugely uncreative.  Not good eh?  Hmm, no, not good at all....

I'm struggling and feel as though I'm swimming against the tide - my swimming strength is not good and I feel unable to go further out to a distant shore, nor to swim back to safety and so my strength is sapped and my resolve is weakening.

My desire is for my love of creating and dancing to be able to go back to being pastimes, not my bread and butter.  It's time to accept that although my creative work is admired by those who are demonstrative about such things not enough people love it enough to buy it.  My marketing skills are nil - and to be honest I'd rather not force anyone to buy anything, they should buy because they can't live without it.

It used to be that my pastimes and experiments could be sold here and there and I'd be happy with that as it offered me a little extra, a way to buy new supplies and play around with new techniques.  For the last two years I've needed the money to be able to buy food, pay bills and it's barely happening.  Two years ago I moved out of the home I had shared with my (now ex) partner, the father of our two children and with whom I had shared 10 years of my life.  During that time the children were born and because we were able to we decided together that I would be a full-time mother and he would work and bring home the money.  I was happy with this decision and was able to do a little work here and there, never expecting that giving up my place in the larger workforce would be the desperate issue that it is now.  Despite what you may read in the media, very few single parents ever planned to become one.

So now I'm treading water - not selling enough of my work to make it viable, too dependent upon the benefits system to live without it at the moment, so far unable to gain other employment (but still trying), battling inner demons that keep me awake at night and most devastatingly beginning to accept  that what I do is not admired enough to make it worth carrying on.

Filled with sadness I have to keep swimming but my arms are tired and I don't know where to swim to.

Tribal Fusion Belly Dance

For some reason I had gone off the boil when it came to making tribal fusion belly dance costumes in the last couple of years.  Actually, I think a bunch of stuff had happened, not least that I moved home due to relationship breakdown and I've had to shift my ideas about a lot of things in my life.

Anyhow....after making a conscious decision in the last month to re-embrace the whole sphere of creating costumes for dancers I re-vamped my Blackwillow Tribal website and I'n currently re-assessing my supplies and then this week this happened:

It's the most opulent headdress I've made yet, dripping with beads and metal and feathers.  I'm definitely going to be making more of these and once I get another stash of coins and stuff I shall make an accompanying costume.

The other things that happened this week was that I got myself a new patroness - I had a long email conversation with her this week and she wants to send me some of her stash of goodies so that I can play with them for her and make lots of new things.  She's already bought some jewelry from the shop and she want MOAR!  I love it when a customer sees jewellery as art.

There's also a new costume waiting to be discussed with the awesome Lily Devla, a most passionate and engaging woman and dancer.  I'm looking forward to getting together with her again for that project.

And so now the weekend, I hope, is given over to the opulence of romanticised 20's style headdresses.  Given that the weather is less than inspiring outside I might as well cosy up and get making.

And I have had a music epiphany - after struggling for months to find music I like to listen to and could imaging myself dancing to I am smack bang in the middle of a gorgeous Soundcloud, currently listening to Jeff Stott.