Succulents and Pearls

Here's a photo I took several days ago, one of Jon's dish gardens. You can see he has combined succulents with geraniums and daisies. Well, I'm not sure they're actually daisies, but they have a daisy look about them, including their foliage. However, they have dark blue centers rather than yellow or even black. Anyway, they're not the kind of plant usually combined with succulents. That's one thing I like about Jon's gardens. They're very imaginative. And certainly we all try to aim for that quality around here.

I spent the day working on pearl necklaces. I brought a whole pile of pearls out of my studio and put them on my work table. I'm not sure how many necklaces I actually thought I was going to get made. It turned out to be two. I'm satisfied with them, but I would be happier if I had made six or eight, an impossible goal. I never get as much done as I think I'm going to.

One of the things I've been doing is adding pieces of gold-filled chain to my necklaces, to give them a richer look. However, in order to do so, I have to cut the chain, thus wasting some of it. Recently I went to a bead show where I found closed jump rings. Normally jump rings have a slit in them so that they can be opened to add something and then closed again and in some cases soldered. The problem with the open jump rings is that the thin wire I use can slip out through the slit. So I had the idea of buying closed jump rings instead of chain. I don't have to cut them, which saves time and material.

I bought as many jump rings as I could afford at the time. Also, I wanted to actually try them. I'm very happy with how they look. Now I wish I had gotten more of them. Fortunately, I saved one of the bags and they have a website. So I'll order some, from them or maybe from the place where I ordered the clasps last week. Ahhhhh, the twenty-first century is very nice, in some ways at least.

I wanted to work on my etching. I have two large plates that I want to put in the etching solution at school because there's a larger dish there. The plates won't fit in the etching dishes I have here in my studio. So, ideally, I need to get one done by Tuesday so I can have it ready to print the following week. I did get a start on one of them, but it will take time to really do the whole drawing as I envision it.

This afternoon, I had a student. I have a friend, a fellow artist from the Village, who has been asking me to show her how to do wire bending. So today, finally, we got together, after talking about it for at least a couple of years. She really enjoyed it and says she'll be back tomorrow. I hope so. I enjoyed having her, and she made a good start. It takes time and practice to perfect the technique. But by the time she left, she had a green glass bead necklace created with copper wire. The copper is easy to work with because it's soft, and it's inexpensive. If she makes a mistake, she can just cut it off and start over. I did the same thing when I first started. Now I have two other artists who want to try as well. Suddenly I've become a teacher with a waiting list. How nice. I'll practice on them and then maybe teach a class. Who knows what the future will bring.