Summer Ending

Here's a photo I took several days ago. It's of one of my enamel pendants. I've worn it and gotten compliments for it. I like the green. In fact, I've always loved green, but I go through periods when I can't seem to make anything unless it has green in it. My current passion is electric yellow green. I love it with black or fushia or blue or purple or anything almost.

I made this enamel pendant several months ago. I usually enamel on the second Saturday of the month, but this last month I didn't do anything. I was tired and kind of burned out. But I'll get back to it. The enamel pendants have been very popular. One problem I had though was that when they sat in the sun in the hot weather, they got too hot. Now I have an umbrella though, so it's not a problem. But on the other hand, when I put them out under the umbrella, they don't sparkle in the sun as much. Well, of course, everything has a trade off.

I spent today on a beaded bead. It was the fourth one I've made and I'm happy with it. I'll make some more as time goes on. I like combining the various different colors and coming up with something small and relatively simple but eye catching. The one I made today is royal blue, green, of course, and fushia. I like the bright colors. I've finally found a way to add some bright shiny objects to my artwork. Enamels fit that category to some degree, but the glass beads help as well, Eventually I'll combine them.

My other plan is to "set" a cabachon in a bead bezel. Jon's been creating some wonderful looking cabachons in the lapidary class he takes. So he gave me a group of them to work with, to try with the beads I have to come up with some good combinations. So many ideas. If I work 18 hours a day, I still wouldn't get everything done.

Tomorrow is the start of the Labor Day Weekend and the official end of summer. However, we're in the middle of a heat wave and will have nice weather for another two months or more. Today we did get a little rain, but it was a tropical storm from the Gulf of California and only lasted a few minutes.

A Day Off

Here's a photo I took of a bead I made yesterday. I made szeveral attempts to construct it according to the directions in the book, but I couldn't make it work that way, so I devised my own method of making it. I have found that trying to follow directions for various beadwork projects doesn't seem to work very well for me. I have to just do it my own way. And actually I like the challenge of doing that.

Today was a day off for me, but I was still thinking about work. I went to a 99 cent store and bought some plastic containers for storing beads in. That's something I haven't really figured out yet: exactly how to store all the beads. They come packaged in several different ways. Some are strung on strings, usually 10 to 12 strands per hank. Some come in plastic bags. Some come in tubes. So far the beads I've gotten in tubes are in three different size tubes. The ones in bags have to be put in boxes when they are opened. And the strung ones either need to remain on their strands or put in little boxes if a project doesn't take a whole strand.

I've gone back and started reading early entries in my blog. I find it interesting. I need to make some notes to bring up certain subjects again or to report my progress. And I'm also doing it to attempt to maintain continuity. I don't actually know how many people read my blog, and I don't know if anyone has read it from beginning to end, although one artist at Spanish Village did tell me she had read it, most of it maybe.

Nowadays there are so many computer related things I can do to help me with my business. I mean there are a great many things I can do besides the obvious ones of having a website and blog and getting business information. Of course, there's ordering, something I'm doing more of. And there's research, looking at other artists' jewelry to get some inspiration. I spent time recently looking at crochet, tatting, and counted cross stitch patterns to get ideas for beadwork. And I looked at striped upholstery fabric to get ideas for patterns and color combinations.

Another possibility is to create an album of my jewelry photos that can serve as a screen saver. Right now I have a great many travel photos that I have combined to play when I walk away from the computer, but if I had jewelry photos that could be a way to display my work and if I had samples of other artists' work they could work on my subconscious mind to give me ideas. So many ideas. So much fun.

Learning About Seed Beads

Here's a photo of a bracelet I made recently. I have been struggling with the seed beads for various reasons, and this was one of the first pieces that I felt was really successful. I made it several weeks ago, and today I noticed that the beads are fading. At the bottom is a striped "bead" made with several colors of some beads called Delica. As far as I know, they are from Japan. They're beautiful, but I'm disappointed that the dark blue ones at the bottom have faded.

I like to wear my jewelry even when I take a shower or go for a swim. That way I can tell prospective clients that the pieces are durable. I still have the belief, maybe old-fashioned, that jewelry should be lasting, have a certain permanence to it. Certainly there's lots of jewelry, specifically costume jewelry, that doesn't have that attribute, but I don't want my work to fall into that category.

I read in a bead book that some beads will fade so I guess I'll just have to assume that any and all of them might be likely to do so. I am bothered by that though. It makes me feel unsure about selling pieces and wondering if they might fade. I'm not sure if that's something to mention to people. Of course, the other option is to just keep trying the different beads to see what happens.

I find it hard to manipulate the seed beads because they're so tiny, but I'm getting better at it. The other thing that's tricky is the fact that the beads are different sizes even those that are marked a certain size. And some of them are more regular in size and shaped than others. Regularity is important when I'm trying to create an even pattern. If the beads aren't the same size, it makes it harder to get everything lined up properly.

I have now managed to collect a pretty good supply of different colored beads. But the other thing I've discovered is that I like the matte beads the best, the ones that aren't shiny or transparent. Or I should say that for some projects I like the matte finish. They seem more chic to me than the shiny ones do. However, I've been making beaded beads and rosettes out of a combination of matte, shiny, and crystal beads. The crystal ones are larger, but they make a nice combination. That's one of my goals, to eventually combine other beads with the seed beads. I think that will creat much more interest in the long run.

Creating Color Schemes

The children's summer art program is going on now and here are some the pieces the children have created. I love them. The one is a figure of a scribe with a scroll, particularly appropriate right now because of the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit going on at the San Diego Natural History Museum across the way. As you can see, there is also an orange and dark brown dragon and another animal which I think is a frog, but I'm not certain.

This morning when I arrived Elizabeth, the artist who teaches the pottery classes, asked me to take some photos with my phone camera. I got a bunch of good ones, I think. The phone isn't the best camera; it only has 1.3 megapixels, but certainly for little things we print up on the computer to use in the studio and for blog photos it's fine. And what I love about it is that I always have it with me. That's so handy. I'm in favor of convenience. It's very important to me. If I can accomplish a task with the minimum of hassle, I'm very happy.

I've been trying to make some beaded jewelry pieces, but I haven't been very successful so far. I'm getting more use to doing it, but I'm still struggling. One of the things I've noticed is that the beads don't come in every single color imaginable. Certainly there is a wider range of colors than there are in natural stones, but there still isn't every single color. I'll have an idea for some color scheme and then I'll find that I can't locate the colors I want. I have to either see if there are manufacturers who make more colors that aren't available locally or I just have to create color schemes with the colors I have, not try to do it the other way around.

I suppose that being use to having access to millions of colors in a computer program makes me fussy. However, I do think I've always been very particular to color. I know that when I paint a room in my house, I spend hours choosing exactly the right color. I wish beads came in as many colors as paints do. That would give me lots of options. I can imagine a time when that could happen. If we artists imagine things, the technologists will catch up and make it actually happen. I wish they'd hurry.

It was a quiet day here at Spanish Village. The President is on vacation for two weeks, so I've been designated the Acting President. So far nothing happened today, but that doesn't mean it will be quiet for two weeks. But the weekends will be worse probably. Oh, well, we'll survive without our Pres.