Icicle Earrings

This month, Erin thought of the theme Frozen (no, not the movie, though she says that works too) for the We’re All Ears Challenge. With the Polar Vortex wreaking havoc on temperatures, one needs to use the snow and frost for inspiration. I live in more temperate climates, so I used the beautiful winter pictures in Erin’s post as inspiration, and made icicle-like polymer clay earrings, with a beady twist added in.

The icicle components were a lot of fun to make, and this is the most measuring I’ve done in a while. 🙂 All components steadily increase in dimension, and have a mixture of translucent clay and purplish blue clay in varying proportions. The smallest components are a 1:1 mix, whereas the largest are pure translucent clay.

The component colors looked fine by themselves, but brushing some Perfect Pearls over them took them a level higher. Even here, I used a progressive mixture of white and blue to mimic the component color gradations.

When the components were done baking, I strung them along with jump rings into two bunchy chains. One of the components chipped, and I swapped in a beaded component that I’d salvaged from an earlier project. When attached to ear wires, the icicle bunches became subtly gorgeous earrings! I loved wearing them to work earlier this week.

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This is a blog hop, and I hope you’ll join me in checking out more inspired earrings at Earrings Everyday!

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Inspiration Station: Art Journal Page

My sister and I have started a theme-inspired creativity session between us this year – our ‘Inspiration Station’ – one of us picks a theme of the month, and each of us makes something inspired by the theme in any media we fancy. Last month, it was my turn to pick, and I had just seen some incredible handmade bowls featuring electroformed crystals by Sabri Ben-Achour on Colossal – so I chose this as our inspiration.

Inspiration Station: Jan inspiration – Ceramic+Crystal Bowls by Sabri Ben-Achour, showcased at Colossal

My creative session included a little bit of salt painting with watercolors, a little bit of gel printing, and a little bit of doodling. I started out with the salt painting first, and then added the gel printing when I felt it would complement it. I’ve finally collected my random doodles and gel printed sheets into an art journal, and I’d thought I’d use this as a cover page. When I was done, I didn’t feel it turned out cover-worthy, and it has now joined the other pages in the journal.

The salt painting: I painted the top left half of the sheet in two shades of blue watercolors, and while the paint was drying, I sprinkled table salt at various spots. Once dry, I gently brushed away the salt, leaving beautiful patterns that remind me of the crystals in the inspiration.

The gel printing: This involved multiple prints. First, one gel print using brown acrylics at bottom right, with crumpled plastic and a ‘Faceted’ stamp providing textures reminiscent of the crackled ceramics. (I should probably use an actual crackled finish for this, which I’ll try next time.) For the central diagonal strip, I cut out a rectangular stencil-mask pair from paper, and gel-printed white on the strip and a bit of black around it. I’d intended to hand-letter the ‘cover title’ within the strip, which was dropped later since this is not a cover, and I didn’t want to write something random.

The doodling: The white on the strip turned out very patchy (since some of our paints seem to be drying out and thickening) so I decided to doodle around the patches with a silver gel pen. Impressed, I continued to doodle with other colors at other places too. I drew sharp shapes and round ones to symbolize the harmony between crystal and ceramic in Ben-Achour’s work. To add some additional interest, I scratched around at parts of the edges with a yellow gel pen to give a greenish tinge to the blues and browns.

The details in the blue and the brown, and the oh-so-difficult-to-photograph silver!

 

I liked both the process and the results of this project much better than my attempts at plain gel printing. I think I may have found what works for me!

Sis has made a texture-filled flowery card that somehow reminds me of mini-gardens in hanging baskets and in slotted containers – do take a look!

Sweet Dreams Earrings

Another month ends, and brings another Art Elements reveal with it. Lindsay Starr hosts this month’s theme – Moon.

At first, I thought this was perfect to try out gel prints with a recently accidentally bought gelli plate (we found we’d ordered a round one instead of a square one.) But I still have hit-or-miss results with gel printing (and you can guess which it was this time), so I came back to jewelry.

I tried out an idea that I had of connecting points around wire hoop earring bases with wire to form a crescent moon. The wire didn’t work out, but I felt good old thread would.

As usual, this look wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I started out, and as usual, I really like it. 🙂

I changed the wire idea a bit to suit the thread. I first crocheted along a portion of the hoop. Then came out a needle, and I wove the thread back and forth between the crochet stitches to form a crescent shape.

I wanted to add streamers to the moons, but crochet wouldn’t create them as thin as I liked, and macramé would have worked better if only the thread was a bit thicker. 🙂 So instead, I added some really tiny charms, and I think this turned out better than the streamer idea. I wondered whether to embellish the moons with seed beads or sequins, but sometimes, simple is best, and I left it as is.

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It looks like quite a few artists have been inspired by Lindsay’s theme, and we’re in for a treat! Hope you’ll check out their interpretations in the blog hop.

Guests: Jenny • Melissa • Kathy • Sarajo • Hope • Sarah • Rebecca • Divya • Anita (you’re here) • Rosantia • Cat • Evia • Alysen • Beth • Tammy

Art Elements Crew: Claire • Laney • Caroline • Cathy • Sue  • Niky • Jenny • Jen • Lindsay

We’re All Ears – Living Coral

This month’s inspiration for the We’re All Ears challenge at Earrings Everyday is Living Coral, the Pantone Color of this Year.

Coral has its place in traditional Indian earrings, and after many trials and errors, some elements of traditional jewelry inevitably ended up in mine as well.

I first mixed some orange and a lot of pink polymer clay for the coral color. For the dangling charms, I used a wavy cutter on a coral sheet and a black-brown one. I matched up the cut edges of each colored sheet with the other, and then used elliptical shape cutters to cut out the charms. I impressed a checkered pattern on the charms, and applied Perfect Pearls for some shine.

Post bake, I added an opaque red glass bead to each charm, and some Loreal beads for movement.

Without any idea of what inspired this pair, my mom commented that the earrings look like traditional coral earrings, and that made my day!

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This is a blog hop, so please head on over to Earrings Everyday to check out the earrings that other designers have created.

Inspiration Station: Cosmetics Holder

My sister and I collectively work on quite a few arts and crafts, and we thought we’d try out a theme-inspired creativity session between us once in a while – our ‘Inspiration Station’ – one of us picks a theme, and each of us makes something inspired by the theme in any media we fancy. We’d like to do this every month, let’s see how it pans out.

Sis chose our very first theme last month: a mood board from Butterfly Reflections, Ink which is in turn inspired by Pinterest. I’d wanted to make a short, squat cosmetics holder for some time, to put eye/lip pencils and sticks in. The mood board was perfectly inspiring to get me started on this project!

Inspiration Station: Dec inspiration – a mood board at Butterfly Reflections, Ink.

To start with, for the squat cylindrical wall of the container, I used a thick cardboard roll left over from used-up tapes. For the base, I used two circles cut from a chipboard – a smaller one that fits within the inside of the wall, and a larger one whose size matches the outside. I adhered the circles to each other and to the wall’s base.

I then glued striped paper, which I cut from envelope covers, onto the inner and outer surfaces of the base and onto the rim. To make them fit well, I cut them larger than the required size and snipped notches at regular intervals outside the ‘borders’, which proved useful to grip adjacent surfaces as well as to ensure that there are no gaps showing in the finished product. While all this dried in the sun, I moved on to gel printing.

Inspiration Station: Cosmetics Holder

The paper for gel printing was, again, from a thread-reinforced envelope, and it provides wonderful texture, both visual and tactile, which I love in containers. I used stamps with circles and patterns for my interpretation of the shapes in the mood board. The gel printing went better than I hoped (but still not exactly like I wanted to – the blues turned out too bright, and pinks are supposed to be flowers and dandelions. 😀 ) However, I just love the outcome! I cut the paper to size and glued it to the outer and inner walls, with the thread still intact.

To set the surfaces and finish the holder, I used matte transparent gel. (Thanks, Sis, for the idea! I think you’ve finally succeeded in making gel ideas stay put in my mind, ready for access at the slightest nudge. 🙂 ) I’ve already started using the holder, and I’m delighted that it’s just the way I wanted it to be!

Sis has made a pretty card for our theme, and you’ll want to look at the cute flower motifs and the background!

Elegant White Earrings

It’s time for yet another reveal at Art Elements, and this month, Claire Fabian has thought of ‘White‘ as the theme.

I ran through my ever-growing to-do list of projects, wondering if white could be the star in any of them. In the end, as it happens more often than not, I made a brand new project. 🙂

I used a right angle weave stitch with white pearl beads as the basis of the beading, with silver seed beads added between the beads for a netting / lace-like effect. I’d started out with an all-white palette, but wasn’t connecting with the earrings I was making, so I redid them with some gunmetal colored beads added in. I like this two-color version much better, and since white is still the defining color in the project, I don’t have any regrets about the addition!

I added white teardrop beads and hematite seed beads to the bottom for more dimension and interest. To finish the earrings, I only had to attach earwires to the top. I like how these earrings turned out looking elegant and traditional.

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The sneak peeks from the Art Elements team and the guests have been interesting, so don’t forgot to join us in the blog hop. Thank you, Claire, for a serene theme to end the year with!

Guest Artists: Alysen • Anita (you’re here) • Beth • Cat • Divya • Elaine • Hope • Jill • Karin • Kathy • Lucy • Rozantia • Sarajo • Susan • Tammy

Art Elements Team: Caroline • Cathy • Claire • Laney • Lesley • Marsha • Susan

Starry Earrings

I guess it’s celestial object inspiration month for me. After the tiny comet earrings that I talked about recently, I made some tiny star earrings! I ended up using leftovers from previous projects for both earring pairs, so they manage to fit the theme of the We’re All Ears Annual Use-Your-Leftovers challenge. (Thank you, Erin, for never failing to host inspiring challenges!)

For these, I used the same leftover clay from my failures in a previous project as I did for the comet charms, and salvaged components from a pair of earrings that I wasn’t wearing much.

I cut out the stars from the clay sheet using a tiny cutter. Similar to the comet charms, I embedded a large jump ring between two stars to make charms with bails. I applied some chalks on the charms for color, and experimented with smearing TLC over each star. It seemed to not smear the chalks, so I went ahead and partially covered each charm with chunky translucent glitter and Perfect Pearls. Off to the oven these went for a bake.

When the charms came out of the oven, I brushed another layer of TLC over the entire surface of each charm, and waved a heat gun over them to set the TLC.

Now all I needed to do was add each charm and a salvaged component to a jump ring, and finish it up with an ear wire! These tiny earrings look really cute, and I can’t decide if I love these or the comet ones more…

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Don’t forget to head on over to the blog hop at Earrings Everyday for more luscious earrings from stash leftovers! And hope you have a wonderful holiday season.