Bangles, Beads, Bugs and Buddies

Finally, the end of a long, long week and the beginning of a new one. Last week was spent nursing sick kids and mourning the death of good Christian man who died much too soon. The kids are feeling better now, the hubby has gotten over his share of the bug and my buddy has been laid to rest, but the sadness lingers.

To help keep the sadness at bay, I joined in a bracelet challenge -- a cuff challenge to be specific. Since I don't wear bracelets much and NEVER wear cuffs, the challenge is an interesting one. We are all working from the same photo of a cuff made by a friend and doing a similar cuff in our own style. Very interesting and quite tough, actually. One friend works in colored wire and is making a bright, happy colored cuff, the other is working in earth tones and I am working, as usual, in two-tones -- gold and silver.

The other project I worked on was based on some lovely mini tapestries one of the local artists here does -- her name is Roberta Barnes and she does these teeny tiny landscape tapestries, and teeny tiny landscape paintings on ceramics. They are breathtaking. I decided I could do something similar, but using the landscape cabochons I have already been incorporating into my jewelry. So, now I am painting with seed beads! My first one was rather rough, as I was flying blind, but since then I have read up a bit on seed beads and hopefully the second one will be much improved. I really like the first one and it is quite a conversation starter. I also plan to use my miniature colored pencil paintings as the focal point of some of these pendants -- which will be lots of fun!

We also got some new "critters" for the acreage -- kitties! We have a mouse problem in the machine shed (including one that crawled up in the pickup's air conditioning shroud and died --peeyew), so a friend gave us some kittens. I went after two -- one for each kid -- but came home with four! Cute little guys though and one has totally adopted me. We now have one black kitten, one yellow kitten and two calico kittens. They are from three different litters, so all at different stages. The calicos are the youngest and the yellow one is the oldest.

Time to feed the calf and the kittens, then off to work at the art gallery for the day. Guess I will take my newest bead painting project with me to work on.

Happy creating!

Websites, Workshops and Weaving

I have spent the last few days recovering from ambulance runs, workshops and an ear infection, but I have kept busy designing my new website.

The home page is done and there are items in my online store, so I went ahead and took the site live. I will continue to revamp the site as I get more "website" savvy.

I love the color scheme, made up of my favorite colors of burgundy, hunter green and parchment tan. I know they are passe, but they will return someday, and for me they are comfort colors.

These colors are also considered to be trustworthy and soothing in website studies, so hey, I may be out of style in home decorating, but I am right in there as far as website design. :)

Now live: http://www.dawnebryant.net/ Check it out! Please. All constructive criticism and advice is welcome!

I taught two fun workshops last weekend, one of beginning wire wrap -- make your own findings, and the other was a beginning jewelry design workshop for basic beaded jewelry.

Several of my students have requested new workshops, so I will soon be lining up a "wire wrapped stones" workshop and a "beginning precious metal clay" workshop. I'm just tickled that anyone would want a repeat workshop from me!

My teaching style is very relaxed, which may not appeal to some folks, but I kind of just go with the flow and let the students decide what they want to work on the most.

So, tentatively planned next is the wire wrapped stones workshop at the Thedford Art Gallery, on Saturday, March 29. I haven't decided whether to do a morning or afternoon class.

I have also been working on something that has eluded me for a while - the Viking Weave. I love the look of necklaces that feature this weave and I have been struggling to learn the weave. With the help of a wonderful tutorial on www.jewelrylessons.com/feelingstone, called the "Something New Viking Weave," I was finally able to complete (but definitely not master) a project using this weave. Hallelujah! I can do something similar with my tube knitter, but when comparing the two, the Viking weave pieces are much more flexible and have a neater appearance, so I will probably end up retiring the tube knitter, except when I want to make something out of yarn.

I ended up making a copper bracelet, but it turned out huge -- too big even for my husband, so I will probably cut the ends off and make earrings out of them, and size the bracelet down to fit myself or someone else with small wrists. That is one of the joys of Viking knit -- its versatility.

Bed is beckoning, so I had better heed its call. Happy creating everyone!

Dawn