Focus in Life - week 7: Beauty of Flowers

Earth laughs in flowers.

                                                          ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I do love that quote, but until Sally used it in her prompt for us this week I hadn't known who it was from, and unusually for me in this age of Google and Wikipedia I hadn't got round to looking it up! 

The beauty of flowers was our photo prompt this week. I could easily have shown you the lovely red roses that T gave me for Valentine's Day, but it was my orchid that kept catching my eye when I got my camera out - not the best photo I'm afraid as the sun has refused to come out today! This orchid is something of a miracle. I maybe able to saw and shape delicate flowers out of sheet metal but I am most definitely not as good with living flowers but so far I have been able to keep my orchid alive for just over two years now. And not only is it alive but it has 15 buds in various stages of blooming as well as this lovely flower, plus new shoots growing. Heaven knows what I'm doing to it, but it seems to be working!

For more beautiful blooms follow this link!

Bead Soup!

Unless you've been hibernating more than me over the last few weeks you'll know that Lori Anderson has been busy pairing up people from all over the world for the 7th Bead Soup Blog Party. This is the fourth party I've taken part in as I took a break when Jamie was tiny, and I've been particularly looking forward to this one Lori is only running one a year now - not surprising considering the amount of work it takes to organise several hundred jewellery designers and beaders!

My partner this time is Deborah Read who lives in snowy Ontario, Canada. You have to go over to her blog to see how beautiful her home looks in the snow at the moment! It almost makes me feel jealous that our snow never lasts for very long - and then I remember that we live at the top of a steep hill and snow and steep hills don't got well together! Deborah works with so many different jewellery techniques and materials from resin and etching copper to lampworking, that I have absolutely no idea what soup ingredients she will have put together for me, but I do know that it's on its way!

My ingredients are on their way over to Canada as well. I can't show you what pretties I've put together for Deborah until they arrive so that I don't spoil the surprise, but you can tell what colours I've included from the teaser above! As soon as our ingredients have arrived I'll show them off more, and then I'll be busy designing ready for the reveal on 6th April.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day! I hope you are having a lovely day wherever you are, and a remembering and being remembered by your loved ones! T and I didn't have much time for more than a quick "Happy Valentine's Day" this morning in the usual pre-school rush, but I'm planning a quiet meal in tonight, followed by curling up on the sofa watching a good film. A bit different than how we spent Valentine's Day two years ago. Today is the second anniversary of the operation that helped me to beat cancer, and with another set of biopsy results this week (all clear, thank God!) today is doubly sweet.

I've got a few blog posts to publish today (well, at least one, we'll see if Jamie naps for long enough for me to finish more than one!), posts that I half wrote at the weekend and the beginning of the week but was too distracted to actually finish. I can't quite seem to concentrate on writing when I'm waiting for biopsy results. I tend to hibernate a bit, and spending time in the workshop becomes more important as I stop worrying when I'm sawing, hammering and filing! Thankfully I've had lots of notonthehighstreet orders for my Lovebird pendants to keep me busy!

I'll be back later today with bead soup!

Inspired by Winter - Snowdrops

I signed up for another challenge - I couldn't resist! I had told myself that with the Focus on Life photo challenge, the AJE earrings challenge and the Bead Soup Blog Party (more about that at the weekend!), not to mention teaching, orders, magazine deadlines etc etc - oh yes, and family! - I had enough going on. But I couldn't resist when I read Sally Russick's post introducing her Inspired by Winter challenge. It was the words "The muted colors of nature as it awaits Spring" that caught my imagination. Our garden and the local park are not looking their best at the moment. We've had so much rain over the last year that everything is so wet, and the new growth hasn't arrived yet. In fact, everything looked a lot prettier a couple of weeks ago when it was covered with snow! But if you look carefully there is beauty, and a promise of what's to come.

And so this is what I made - subtly patterned earrings in off-white and a dark dusky purple jade, reminding me of the snowdrops that have started to grow and the berries that the birds have almost finished off the bushes along our route to school! The ceramic teardrops are by Bo Hulley. They've been sitting on my desk for a while, waiting for the perfect time, like the snowdrops they represent I suppose. I hope that you like them - and if you really like them you can find them here! And I hope that you will take the time to see what everyone else who took up Sally's challenge has made. I'm teaching all day today, so I'll be working my way round the blogs this evening.

Sally Russick (our hostess)

Patti Vanderbloemen

Shelly Buettner

Therese Frank

Donna Bradley

Jo Tinley (me!)

Karin Slaton
Rochelle Brisson

Renetha Stanziano

Tanya Goodwin

Jenny Davies Reazor

Cynthia Machata

Lola Surwillo

Veralynne Malone

Mary Lamoray

Lynsey Brooks

Mary K  McGraw

Ailsa Cordner

Staci Smith

Rana Wilson

Karin King

Beth Emery

Pam Farren

Jess Green

Susan F.

A Collaboration

A new month, a new resolve to blog more often. I have to admit that last month was a harder one than I expected. I expected to come back completely refreshed after the Christmas break and bounce back into everything with lots of energy but I forgot a couple of things - firstly I was ill over Christmas so why on earth did I think that I was going to get refreshed?! And secondly - it was January! I didn't have the January blues, but with all the grey weather it was too easy to feel a bit flat after the boys' birthdays and Christmas. It was also an extra busy month in that I had a lot of private tuition students booked in - three last week plus a whole day teaching one of my college classes last Saturday plus my usual Tuesday and Wednesday night classes. Good for the bank balance, lots of fun while I was actually teaching but very little time to do my own jewellery making. I got everything done, met all deadlines, but I did have a lot of late nights in January!

Anyway, a new month - and a new collaboration! If you've been reading my blog for more than a month or so you must have picked up on just how much I love Mindy Macgregor's beautiful lampwork. The colours she uses frequently challenge me, which I need as I can easily get stuck in a colour rut, and the detail she puts in her beads is amazing. And thankfully Mindy likes what I make with her creations too! Before Christmas Mindy emailed to ask if I would be interested in a collaboration. She was keen to see some of her new, smaller cabochons set in silver to form a bracelet, and wondered if she sent me some, would I be interested in making a bracelet with them? Can you guess just how many seconds I thought about it before saying yes please?!

If you haven't guessed already, the beautiful lampwork in these photos are the cabochons that Mindy sent me last week. I can't decided which I love the most! I love the size of the set of smaller cabochons and I know that I will be buying as many of this size as I can from Mindy! They are perfect for bracelets and smaller pendants. The colours in the larger cab are just amazing, colours that I would not have considered putting together but work perfectly together. The smaller set will form part of a bracelet, and I have a pendant planned for the larger cabochon. I will post updates to show you how the designs are progressing!

Focus on LIfe - week 5: Capture Our Hearts

"Capturing our hearts" was the prompt Sally gave us this week for the Focus on Life photo challenge, asking us to look for hearts in our surroundings. I didn't have to go far to find these pretty ones! They are a birthday card from a lovely friend of mine, and they were far too lovely to put out with the recycling after my birthday last April, so they have been decorating my book shelf and making me smile ever since.

You can also get a snapshot of my reading tastes in this photo. The shelf at the top of the photo has my chick-lit, the books I go to for a bit of light relief. The shelf below has my collection of Anne McCaffrey books, including treasured copies that she signed for me when I was lucky enough to meet her at her home, over a decade ago now. I started reading her books when I was 13 (I'm going to be 40 in April!), and they are like old friends. A friend of mine calls books you love like this "literary teddy bears"! I may know every twist of the stories, but I still love reading them again. Other shelves contain everything from David Eddings (another favourite!) to Harry Potter and Jane Austin. My Confirmation Bible is there too, and a couple more far more well-read editions with rather beaten covers! You can also catch a glimpse of one of the many lego models Ben and I love to make on rainy afternoons when Jamie is napping!

AJE Component of the Month - Spring Leaf

It was Karen Totten's turn to create and send out the Art Jewelry Elements Component of the Month for January - beautiful beads that have made all of the AJE team dream of pies! She wrote a blog post yesterday showing how she made them, and I am amazed at how much work goes into making them. I always find it fascinating to see how artists create with other materials.

And this is what I made with my pie bead.....

I made a bangle with a lovebird - a hopeful spring symbol to go with the green leaf on the bead that Karen sent me. The wooden beads are from Smitten Beads, and I've used copper wire to twist peanut seed beads around the thicker wire of the bangle to stop the larger beads from slipping around too much. I'm really rather pleased with it, although it's not my usual style of jewellery. And I'm very pleased with the bangle I made! I've got daisy and poppy bangles in my Daisychain Extra shop, and I think lovebird ones will be joining them soon!

I'm really looking forward to seeing what the rest of the AJE blog team and this month's guest challengees have made with Karen's beads. You can see what they've made too by following the links below...

Our guests:

ArtZhodgepodge
Shirley Moore
Boot-C

The AJE team:

Karen Totten, our hostess

Jen Cameron 
Kristi Bowman
Diana Ptaszynski
Kristen Stevens
Lesley Watt
Francesca Watson
Melissa Meman
Jo Tinley
Linda Landig
Sue Kennedy
Jenny Davies-Reazor