Exciting things in my basement....

• Envirotex Lite (what's the difference between regular & lite? idk! but I'm going to find out!
• Roving + two felting needles....
• Many, many half-finished metal curiosities!
• A dozen+ landscape paintings that will get MONSTERS painted into them in January!
• A piano waiting to be disassembled into many different pieces for different uses.... i forsee a bench, some jewelry, and some sculptures coming out of this :D
• Generally organized chaos!!!!!

Fabric scraps

Here's to playing with fabric scraps and pretending I can quilt!

VFW Craft Fair

Last weekend I was in a spur-of-the moment (like they called around 7pm the night before) craft fair. I met some nice people, didn't sell much, and am super grateful to those friends who stopped by to hang out :)

2012 Dziesmu Svetki Milvokos

I guess I made enough stuff to fill a table :) I almost even look a little professional, if I do say so myself.

I was at Milwaukee's Latvian Song & Dance Festival from July 4 - 8. This year I was selling sandblasted glassware, jewelry, decorative switchplates, and lino printed cards. My mom had the table next to me, which was fun :) Now slowly moving onto (what feels like a monumental task) photographing jewelry and other items to post up for sale on Etsy.

Organized!

See? I can be an organized printmaker, if need be!

Proof of concept.... Wood + metal + Latvian designs

Here are two examples of the new idea made into actual physical real life objects....

Three newest pendants

Today's efforts after work yielded these! #27, #28, & #29 in a series of fifty. I am 58% finished with my bezel setting challenge! Yea!

Another proof

Here's another similar card with Latvian roots that's turning into some new cards:

New prints!

Here's a proof of a new Latvian card I'm working on --- I've cleaned it up a  bit since this picture was taken and have started printing cards for Dziesmu Svetki like this:

Multiple perspectives

I really enjoy seeing multiple perspective of things. One way this manifests is that i just LOVE to look at the end result of art projects where either the whole class/room/group is given a description of the assignment and we see how all the end results are different OR things like what Corning Glass did here where they took (what appear to be) children's drawings, made them out of glass, and posted both the idea + end result.

Here are two examples from the Corning Glass Museum site......

On paper:




In glass:

A new pattern

Here are a couple new pendants that I've been excited about:

Glass sandblasted

Aaaaaaaand sandblasting complete! Now to wash them and box them for the show.

Sandblasting

Guess who is going to the Vinery to sandblast this week?

I quite enjoy using this pink duct tape instead of the grey stuff ;)  Thanks to that long ago 3-year bag arranger for getting it for me :)  My goal is to finish cutting ALL of the existing glass in my house, sandblast it, and then be done with this stuff for .....  ever?  for years?  For a long time anyway.  I enjoy other projects more than this one (although I did get quite a bit of "quality TV time" in while working on these the other day).

Ooooh! Shiny!

I've been playing around with a new technique: polishing stuff in a rock tumbler. Initial results? WOW!!! Sooooo shiny!

And there's an extra bonus, too. Yesterday I found out that half an hour is enough to polish the silver BUT LEAVES MY DICHRO ALONE... Which is awesome because that means I can polish all of my glass bezel pendant without dealing with the buffer!

Dirty patterns

These are nowhere near done, and in fact are very dirty. But sometimes I think that the patterns left on a piece just after soldering are just so neat.

The other sock monster!

Here's the other animal/monster for the baby mobile we made in March :)

Glass Fish

This year, for the first time ever, I participated in a glass magless exchange (technically "magnets" but since everyone would have had to pay extra shipping costs if everyone glued magnets on to the back of their work, we all skipped the "glue magnet on" step and hence then name "magless").

I made fish.

One heckuva LOT of fish:

Rainbow snake!

In March, I made two stuffed animals for a dear friend's baby mobile..... these are the only pictures I took, though, so you folks might not get to see the green bat/owl/monster that also went to her house.

Four more stone settings

Man. I have to work on polishing these, but I figured I'd post a picture anyway --- even if it *is* dirty. This brings my total up to 16. Thirty-four more to go....

Surprise in the mail!

Someone sent me a bunch of AWESOME little dichroic cabs in the mail :) :) :) Now to design some silver to go around them.....

12 bezel settings

Thirty-eight more to go..... The I get to install a solar tube in my kitchen! By the way, i made all of the cabs used in these pendants and earrings, too. They're glass. Some are dichroic and the striped ones were just a neat technique I learned about earlier this year.

Starting to feel lived in!

Here's how the workbench fits into a whole wall of metal-working goodies :D

Still needed: proper ventilation.

50 earring challenge

I finished 50 pairs of earrings last month.

Bench in progress.....

Someone mentioned that they're tired of looking at that picture from November AND ps, it's been nearly five months since I've updated this blog. So. Here goes an attempt to get back in the swing of sharing things that I'm working on.... Because there's been a lot of new stuff going on :)