Production mode...

I'm gearing up to make ornaments for the upcoming Christmas season.  Here's some canes I made for my "Tertiary Trees" ornaments:

I'm both excited and not excited at the same time to begin the process.  I love my ornaments, but I do get tired of making the same thing over and over again....

This is Q'ort...

...I wonder if he can help Ping find his spaceship?

Lotus flower

Zen Garden.  Ack!  I'm about as far away from Zen as you could get (or even want to get).  Luckily, we can use any number of components associated with it.  I picked the Lotus flower, since I'm on a flower kick these days.  I had a rather different idea in mind, but it didn't work out.  So, I just went with what I've been enjoying lately:

I put the symbol for "faith" on one side of the ring...

...and "beauty" on the other side...



I like the way the colors look together--it's a nice ring to wear.

First Love....

It occurs to me, as I look over my blog, that most of what I've posted is side stuff.  I mean, most of my output over the years has been canes, canes, and MORE canes.  Quilt canes to be specific:

 

It's been kind of nice focusing on different things--first at Clay Camp, and then during these last few challenge weeks.  I've been growing just a wee bit tired of working with clay; I'd been in a rut.  So changing things up has given me an opportunity to indulge my creativity and have a lot of fun, too!

That's not to say I've left canes behind.  Even though I've had the worst time trying to figure out what to do with completed canes, I still love making them.  Lately, I've been making beads, buttons, and rings.  It seems like there should be something else to do with them, though.  

Heh.  Some of these quilt canes have been around over ten years.  I can't seem to stop!

 

When I get a chance, I'll post some of the stuff I've been making with these.  

Huh.  I just realized--I don't have any of my snowflake canes represented here.  Probably because they are used up as soon as I make them.  I'll post them (and my snowflakes) a little later.

Ring #5

This is the fifth ring I ever made (the less said about ring #4, the better!).  So far, it is my absolute favorite.  It's pretty out there, isn't it?  But I love it.  The construction was a bit tricky and a little sloppy, but it holds together very well.

Except for the swan.  Oh the swan!  I made the perfect swan.  Put the ring in the oven and baked it.  Then the swan chipped off.  Drat!  I set it aside in a safe place while I finished the ring.  When it was completely done, I went to glue the swan on the pond and...yeah, a safe place. *roll-eyes*  So I made another one.  My workspace is in my living room and I transported the little critter on my baking tile into the kitchen to bake.  Riiiight.  It fell off the baking tile.  Take a look at the picture.  Go ahead, I'll wait.  The silly thing is about 1/4" big.  My kitchen linoleum is in tones of white, beige, and brown.  I couldn't find it.  *sigh*  So round number three.  The swan turned out okay and I got it attached to the ring.  It wasn't perfect, but nobody but me would notice.

Several days later, I was showing it off to someone and I chipped it off again (and lost it, of course)!  DRAT!!  But wait!  Oh happy fortune!  I found the original swan (which is the best of the three I must admit).  This time I drilled the tiniest hole in the bottom of the swan and a corresponding tiny hole in the pond.  I put a bit of wire in the holes and super-glued the thing and now it's perfectly secure.  Whew!  Anyway, a side view:

I totally love the bear! 

I'm so very sad today...

...my landlord and his wife moved to Iowa this morning.  They are the BEST LANDLORDS EVER!  They've been such good friends, too and I'm going to miss them terribly.  I've had so much joy lately, sharing my creations with Marlene--she is so encouraging and has such nice things to say about them.  So, last week I decided I would make a going away present for her.  I've been working on it all week and finally finished it and gave it to her last night:

I took a class a couple of years ago from Christi Friesen.  I used that class, her inspiration, and her techniques in making this piece.  Here are some close-up detail pics....

 

Dragonfly Pond

I think this has been my hardest challenge yet.  How hard could it be, really?  Dragonflies are beautiful creatures and they are everywhere in jewelry these days.  I don't want to copy other people, though.  So, I thought a LOT about it and came up with this:

I was going for a swampy, pond-y, dragonfly wallow type of thing.  You know, kind of dark water, with muddy banks and cattails and green, reedy stuff; with a few flowers thrown in for color; and blue sky with wispy clouds to top it all off.  I'm not sure I achieved it.  I'm not sure I like it.  It's better than the forest floor challenge, but...I don't know....










 
I did really enjoy going through the beads and swapping them around on the bead board.  It took several hours, but it was a strangely soothing experience.

Ring #3

This is the third ring I ever made (we won't talk about ring number two...).  I don't normally like the warmer colors, but I love the way this red orange and yellow orange look with white.  The colors are leftovers from my "Tertiary Tree" canes (more on that later).  I just sort of noodled around with it and came up with this ring.  It's the ring I wear most often--it looks great on my thumb....

Columbia Lily ring (Tiger Lilies challenge)

After I finished last week's challenge, I knew right away what I was going to do for the Tiger Lilies challenge (Heather was kind enough to post the upcoming challenges--it's a good thing too, because I have NO clue what I'm going to do for most of them).  Here it is:

It doesn't quite top last week's entry as my favorite, but it's close....

Washington Wildflowers (Bee Challenge)

I totally LOVE this bracelet.  This week's challenge was Bees.  That was a bit of a stumper at first.  Then I was mulling around some ideas (and had to discard most of them--where in the world do you find bee beads?!).  But last week's challenge gave me a clue--I'd found a website that had a whole list of wildflowers native to the State of Washington.  I started thinking about how I could incorporate them into my flower rings.  And Eureka!  I got the idea for this bracelet.

First, I made the Spotted Saxifrage (isn't this just the neatest flower--I had no idea such a blossom existed):

Then I followed up with the lovely Nootka Rose:

 Then on to the Showy Phlox:

And finally, the Copperbush:

I also made a Blue Anemone, but it broke when I strung it.  It turned out all right, though, because the bracelet would have been too long with it:

And, of course, the bee:

Forest Floor - Part 3

So I cut up my cane a bit and recombined it, then wrapped it around a pencil to bake and cut the result into pieces.  I strung it on the yarn and it came out like this:



I added a few items for embellishment.  Salmonberries:

And a snail, some fungus, and a couple of flowers.  I wrapped some headpins around my exacto knife a couple of times to shape them and attached the embellishments and slid them through the yarn.  It seems to hold well.  Anyway, here is the finished piece:



*sigh*  I don't like it....

Forest Floor - Part 2

I found this photo while googling and it captured the feeling I wanted for my challenge piece.  It looks like it was taken by ephenA (I'm not sure of blog protocol, but I wanted to be sure the actual photographer got credit).

I think I did pretty well at matching the yarn to the photo and the clay mixes to the yarn.  I'm pretty happy with it, anyway.  Next step, smashed ikat...

...and the final cane:

Phew!  I'm beat--on to the beads tomorrow....

Forest Floor - Part 1

*sigh*  This weeks Inspired by Nature challenge is Forest Floor.  Maybe it was the picture accompanying the challenge post...mushrooms!  *shudder* Vile, awful things they are!  I'm afraid I wasn't feeling the inspiration.  Maybe that's why I have an hour-long, one-way commute--it gives me time to think.  Or rather, not think.  I just kind of zone out and my creative side jumps out and gives me idea after idea.  Kind of hard to write down when you're driving, though.

So. I grew up on Port Susan Bay.  As a child, my life sort of revolved around the water.  The tide going in and out; playing out on the mud flats; swimming in the bay; beachcombing; logwalking.  How I loved the beach!  But wait a minute--how could I have forgotten the woods?  My siblings, cousins, and I played in the woods behind our house almost as much as we went down to the beach.  As I was driving home and thinking about it, the memories came so thick and fast that my eyes welled up.  And inspiration came.  Now if I could only find the materials I needed....

I went to Michaels looking for yarn.  The kind of yarn that was sort of fringey--I didn't know the name, but I would know the yarn when I saw it.  Sadly, no luck.  Fortunately, JoAnn's was nearby.  I found this wonderful yarn:

  It's called "Angel Hair Stripes."  It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but if you could touch it, you'd know why I had to have it.  It was so VERY soft!  Anyway, maybe what I was really looking for would go with it.  *sigh* Nope.  I found the type of yarn I was looking for--eyelash yarn, but the color was all wrong--a cool, sagey-type green.  It wouldn't go with this lovely, warm-toned, delightfully soft, angel hair.  I went to the yarn store in Stanwood to see if I could find eyelash yarn in the right shade.  Well, no.  But I did find a couple of things that  might work:

Anyway, then I had to figure out what exactly I was going to do.  I spent most of today mixing colors of clay and trying to learn how to do a chain stitch.  UNfortunately, trying to crochet made me crochety.  Time for plan B....

Butterfly Keeper

Remember when I was talking about smashed ikat a couple of posts ago?  Here's some more of the canes I made: 

I have short, fat fingers so  most rings do not look good on my hands.  But I got this wonderful ring from Taen at Clay Camp...
















It really looks good on my hand and it gave me inspiration to create more rings. 

Here's the first ring I made.:
I used some of that ikat and I just love it (it looks good on my hand, too)


I've become a little obsessed I'm afraid....

I think that I shall never see...

...A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the sweet earth's flowing breast; A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray; A tree that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair; Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain. Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree. -- Trees by Joyce Kilmer So Heather Powers challenge this week is Trees. I've actually wanted to make this ring for several weeks now, but this challenge inspired me to move it to the top of my list of wild and crazy ideas. This is the second challenge of Heather Powers that I've entered and I'm thinking that perhaps my creations may not exactly fit with her "inspiration from nature" themes. I've thought a fair amount about this while I was preparing my entry. Now, I totally love nature--my favorite place to be in the whole world is at the ocean on the Washington coast. A place closer to heaven, I have a difficult time imagining. Anyway, I've come to the conclusion that my appreciation of nature is heightened by its interaction with people. Animals live in nature, but they don't have the ability to step outside of it and admire it or be moved by its beauty. It takes people to be in awe, or fear, or overflowing joy due to nature. So my pieces have a blend or interaction of man and nature. No matter how much mankind tries to subdue nature, nature will not be bound. But if mankind did not exist, who would care about nature? Who would labor to protect it? I suppose man can be nature's worst enemy, yet also nature's best friend.