After much playing around with a bazillion sizes, shapes, materials and colors of beads...and a trip to every bead store in town, looking for bluer anemone that doesn't exist...I'm happy with my new color composition. I took out the big white shells, and added turquoise stone chips and bronzish colored pearls.
I've got shells, coral, pearls, anemone, and antique gold in my tray....I'm not happy with the color composition...something is off...just a little bit off...and I can't figure it out. Help!
We celebrated our Christmas on Sunday. My thoughtful husband gave me more storage for my studio! I now have a wooden bench and three leather-looking bins to sit on its lower shelf. It fills exactly (of course!) an empty spot under a set of shelves.
Inside the bins were a sweater I saw at Macy's and hinted at, a page a day calendar for my desk at work, and another sweater. Kate got me a sweater too...I needed new (read bigger) sweaters.
I've already decided I'm going to use the bins to store fabric and fibers, since getting those in and out of the drawers they're in now is a pain.
Mine are made with the gold colored ear hooks, the sterling pair are yours.
The paper is coated in matte varnish, and the scissors are held together with Ultimate, but I'm not sure of their longevity (don't wear them in the shower)...though since they're meant to be fun and not a family heirloom, I guess that's okay.
I found the scissors!
I'm not sure if you can tell from the picture or not, but they have a definite front and back...I'm sure they were meant to be embellishments for paper, not charms...so I used Ultimate to glue two of them together to make one 3-D pair of scissors...it worked well. (The scissors on the far left are the glued together ones.)
I have eight embellishments, which will make four charms, which will make two pair of earrings. Perfect! One pair for you and one pair for me.
I made a paper bead out of newspaper, which looks poopy. I've since had an epiphany and am going to do something altogether different for the paper part...I don't know how to explain it, other than to say flat, instead of round (paper covers rock)...so you'll have to wait and see.
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These are the stone beads I have in my stash...
I was planning to use the beads that aren't round (the ones on string), but I threw a pair of scissors in there for size comparison and decided they're too small. The bigger round ones are the right size, but I was picturing a rough shape in the finished product, not a smooth shape...more like a rock, less like a bead...so I might run to the bead store today on my lunch hour.
Do you have a color preference? I'm thinking I want mine in a light brownish...or maybe a greenish...no, definitely a brownish.
I'm wondering how it will look having gold colored scissors on sterling ear hooks and wire. Maybe I'll but a little gold bead just under the ear hooks, that should tie it in. Or maybe I should just work outside of my comfort zone and combine metals all willy-nilly, whether they match or not. Ohhh....scary....
You said yesterday that "I can't believe that between the
two of us, we can't find better crows than the beads I have - that
means there aren't better crows out there, doesn't it?"
I have found one other source that's better...unfortunately, it's so much better that it's not financially feasible to buy a flock of crows there. I found the website months ago, but never bookmarked it, and it's taken me forever to find it again so I can share it with you. I'm glad I did though, the artist's work is absolutely incredible..her website is www.anya-stone.co.uk.
Forced perspective is the correct term you were thinking of (that made yesterday's picture look like the tree would never fit inside the pumpkin). How's this?
I need to figure out how to attach the crows to the tree yet...that's on my agenda for tonight, provided I don't get sidetracked.
I found some little scissors charms when I was cleaning my studio...left over from the Halloween miniature I made you last year, I think...I thought they'd work to make rock, paper, scissors earrings...so I set them aside somewhere close instead of putting them away. As soon as I figure out where that somewhere close is (dammit!) I'll make a couple pair.
Here's a fun song for you this morning...Stupidly Happy, by XTC...another band I'm quite fond of. Ignore the video, it's from the British TV show Skins...I couldn't find the song without it.
The video reminds me...I tried to find a picture of the moon from last Friday to post it..."full moon" is not a phrase you want to google. Yuck.
More twisty twisty and a second coat of blue paint.
I'm still not sure about the paint...as I was putting the second coat on it seemed like it was brushing off the first coat in a few spots. I have to do a third coat in places, so I'll go slowly and pay close attention...I was hurrying through the second coat because I wanted to get it done before Doctor Who came on...if I don't like how the third coat goes on I'll trash the pumpkin and start over with a new one.
Right now I'm sitting here listening to the wind roar outside my window. It was 44 degrees yesterday and rained all day, which melted at least a foot of snow and made everything all wet.
This morning it's 24 degrees...with the strong wind it feels like 14 degrees...and everything that melted yesterday is now frozen solid.
School is closed...I'm afraid to venture out to go to work. I suppose I'll give it a try, if it's too bad I'll turn around and come home...at least work isn't that far away.
I got the pumpkin out to cut a hole in it so I could test the tree height, which is just about perfect. Then I sat and stared at the pumpkin, wondering if paint would stick to the inside.
I googled, and scanned through instructions on making various craft pumpkin projects, but couldn't find one that mentioned priming first...so I decided to paint a test patch. (I sneezed when I was squeezing paint out of the tube, so my test patch is about ten times bigger than I intended.) Then, after I had the inside painted and was putting the pumpkin back down on the table, right next to the piece that I cut out and am going to throw away, I realized that I should have used the garbage piece for my paint trials! I am such a dork some days.
I was extremely skeptical about the paint, I figured it would rub right off at the merest touch, but it's dried overnight now, and seems to be okay...it will rub off, but only if I really work at it.
As promised, here's your snow picture...
On a side note, did you see the full moon last Friday night? Gorgeous! If it wasn't so cold out I'd have taken pictures.