Adventures In Patinas

Do you work with patinas on your metals?  I make all of my clasps from sterling, gold filled, and copper wire, but I've never really explored putting a patina on them. 

Then I read a really cool tip from Rena Klingenberg on how to oxidize metals using hard boiled eggs. And I decided to play.

I started out with shiny copper wire, and boiled up a couple of eggs. When the eggs were ready, I put a coil of wire, a copper clasp, and the eggs into a zip lock bag, and smooshed (a highly technical term) the eggs, shell and all, into a big gooey mess.

Then I waited about 20 minutes.  And this is what I got!

I need to polish them up a bit, but this is what they looked like straight out of the bag. I was so excited about the possibilities, I threw some more wire and a toggle in the bag, wanting to see what happened if I left it over night.

Sadly, when I opened the ziplock the first time, I must have let out enough of the sulfur gas to make further oxidation impossible. So after an overnight egg bath, this is all that happened.

Lessons learned? First, if you're going to do this, pull together all the metal you want to oxide to do in one batch, because the magic doesn't happen with leftovers.  Second, my husband is a wonderful, patient man who's gotten used enough to my weirdness that instead of calling the folks from the loony bin, he just said, "why is there a bag of smashed eggs and wire on the kitchen counter?" as though it were a normal thing.

I've also read about using a salt/vinegar mix to patinate copper, too. That may be the next mad scientist experiment!

Do You Have Earrings That Match?

Last week I took some new work into one of the galleries that carry my jewelry. They chose several necklaces, among other things, and asked if I had earrings to match.

Um, not for all of the necklaces they chose. But I could in a day or so!

What better excuse to go home and play with the beads, right? This was one of the pieces I needed to coordinate with, and I was extra excited to figure out how to make earrings with the cool howlite double-holed spikes.

Luckily, I had two white spikes and two black spikes left over from the batch Cynthia sent to me. So, because to me, more is never too much, I made TWO pairs or earrings for the shop owners to chose between.

The black pair is now in the gallery. The white ones are mine, at least for the time being!  There were a lot of little pieces of copper wire that sacrificed themselves as I tried to figure out how best to work with the two holes (cross them over above the bead? loop them around? cross them behind the bead somehow?), but I'm happy with the result. Next bead show, I'm on the lookout for more double-holed beads to experiment with!

So how about you? Do you make earrings to match the necklaces and bracelets that you make?  Or do you create earrings you love and then make something else to go with them?

The Soup That Stayed Home

In putting together bead soup mixes this year, I came up with five possibilities.  Yes, five. I was having a grand time, sitting in my bead room, cackling like a bit of a mad beady scientist.

I eventually settled on the one (okay, ones) to send to my partner Rita. But the third runner up, or the Miss Congeniality of the bunch, kept calling to me.

So I made something with it myself.

Ceramic, agate, jade, freshwater pearls, Czech glass, ZNet Shows
 crystals, copper, hand fabricated clasp

The pendant is two ceramic beads, an agate donut, and some
copper discs, all on waxed cotton

I wore this soup out to lunch yesterday, which in a strange way seemed an appropriate place for it to make its debut. The soft greens felt especially spring-like to me, which was a welcome reminder that the weather will, eventually, warm up.

A Spike In Activity (Bad Pun, Fun Beads)

A while back, the fabulous Cynthia Machata of Antiquity Travelers reached out to some bloggy friends with an offer -- would we be interested in trying to make something with some howlite spikes she'd found at her local bead store? I took her up on the offer so fast, I think my keyboard was smoking...Subtle, I was not.

So here's what arrived in the mail:

Actually, this is only a portion of what was in the package. Cynthia sent both black dyed and natural white howlite. I just forgot to take a picture of the whole pack before jumping in. Bad, bad beady swapper, I know.

I've done several necklaces with a sterling armature that I shape and then use as a framework for freeform peyote (see some of them in posts here and here). It's a fun technique that seemed well suited to these spikes. But these beauties cried out for copper.

To keep the focus on the cool spikes, I decided to keep the accent beads black and white as well. 

A lot more beading could have gone onto this frame, but less was more here.

I have two black spikes left over, lurking on my worktable. I think they're destined to be some bold earrings, but you never know what'll happen.

Want to see what Cynthia made with her spikes?  Go here. And keep your eyes open for gemstone spikes at your local bead store -- they are big fun to work with!

Casablanca - or, How I Finished Another UFO

Sometimes I bite off more than I can chew.  Now when it's, say, pecan pie or a Snickers bar, I muddle through.  When it's a beading project, however, sometimes I have to put it aside for awhile until I can screw my courage up enough to tackle it again.

In the last Bead Soup Blog Hop, I took one of those bites, and among the pieces I made was a medallion that was heavily encrusted with bead embroidery, using the delectable soup sent by my fabulous partner Nancy Dale.

It ended up being about 4 1/2" across.  That, my friends, is a lot of embroidering. It was enough to make my husband say "woah!!" when he saw it.  And as much as I loved it, I was burned out on it for a while.  That, and the prospect of stitching the edging on those little cutouts on the interior of the piece was kind of freaking me out.

So the other day I was in the fabric store, and decided to pick up some ultrasuede to back the medallion.  A few hours later, here's what I had:

This is the back view (thank you, Dr. Obvious), so you could see the finishing of the interior openings.  Yep, those are 15's lining each one, and I'll admit it, there was some cursing involved as I worked to slice the holes in the backing and fill those tight little spaces with beads.  Trimmed up and edged on the front, here's the completed medallion:

Okay, so that was done.  Now, how to make it into something wearable.  I had some bead soup left over, so I made a couple of beaded beads.  Because I used the random beads in the bead blend from Nancy, they were a little freeform, and a little funky.  Then I raided my stash for some cool copper beads that also had interior openings that echo the openings in the medallion.  Some cool pinky/coppery freshwater pearls, and a copper toggle I made to work with one of the copper beads as a clasp, and I was done:

Granted, this is not a necklace for a woman who's uncomfortable being noticed.  But it is surprisingly light and completely comfortable to wear. I've called it Casablanca, because it reminds me of someplace exotic and warm, someplace that the desert breezes might mold the sand into serpentine dunes like the lines on the gorgeous JulsBead at the center of the medallion.  Maybe it's something that would be worn by the genie that comes out of the lamp you'd discover on the caravan trail as you cross that desert.

In any event, this has been a grand adventure, and I'm very pleased with the results. Thanks, Nancy, for the fantastic inspiration of your soup!