I am busy this week juggling work, a stack of projects, a monthly commitment, and a one-week online class taught by Stephanie Lee. The class is about non-traditional book-making using soldered metal (brass or nickel) for the covers and creating pages from plaster and binding them all together into thick, palm-sized treasures. I try not to miss an opportunity to take a class from Stephanie as she is a favorite artist and a fabulous instructor. Last year she started offering classes online and although live is always better there is nothing like the flexibility of an video based class that you can view and work on whenever it fits your schedule.
You just never know what you'll learn in a class that will contribute to your own art - it might be the whole kit and kaboodle, or it might just be one or two elements. I am interested in these books, of course, being the journal fanatic and handmade book enthusiast that I am, but I am also interested in where I might apply it to the jewelry I'm making and how it can improve my soldering, spur my creativity, and push me off into new directions.
This has kept me up too late a few nights this week already - because night time is the only free time. I pay for it in the mornings, but it is oh, so great when the music is going and I am in my studio feeling in the creative groove. Makes me think back to college days when I would spend hours in my painting nook in the big school studio.
These are the two book covers I've started - cut, smoothed, flooded with solder and bezels attached. I've also dragged out bits of old jewelry from the stash to experiment with.
This one was very straightforward. I incorporated an old earring of sterling silver.
This one was more interesting. The butterfly had abalone shell in the wings and when I went to imbed it into the solder the abalone burned, smelled awful, and then just flaked out. Which was okay with me as I like the empty wings better anyway. I haven't started my plaster pages yet, since we are going through a bit of a cold snap right now and have had a cold north wind blowing the last two days, but will as soon as it warms up a tad.
While I'm at the bench it seems a shame not to be creating new work of my own, and I wanted to work with ball chain on these bezels.
It is more of a challenge than I thought it would be and I set off the smoke detector more than once! But I love the look of the ball chain around the bezels.
These are far from finished but already I can see that adding the ball chain will give the whole piece more shine. I can't wait to patina, collage, drill, resin, and hang pearls, crystal beads and bits of frayed silk from these...
I just love what I am doing these days. These will be joining the others in my etsy shop before too long.
I love them too!!! :)
Posted by: Shari French | October 27, 2011 at 12:24 PM