I'll Pay You a Movie Tomorrow for a Blog Post Today!

I promised myself a selection from Movies-On-Demand if I wrote and posted my blog tonight. (It's 10:22pm--I had better work fast!)

And I promised myself that from now on, I only had to write a paragraph with each blog post.

I foster deals between Strong-and-Successful Brenda and Rather-Sit-on-My-Duff Brenda to motivate both me's. I mind-murmur things like "You only have to run to that far mailbox, but you do have to run to it." or "Since I had that chocolate shake this afternoon, I'll have ice water instead of a Coke just now."

[Alright, well technically I'm already three paragraphs in . . . but, that's sort of the point, I just need to get over the initial hump of starting something, then I'm fine.]

But, enough of that.I have been meaning to tell you about the workshop that I took with Dean Ebben at Kathy Malkasian's Valley Ridge Art Studio (located here in what Richard Salley describes as bucolic Wisconsin).

Dean's an amazing artist--and it takes an amazing artist to get me to break free from taking non-jewelry workshops. (Since the new millennium, Micheal deMeng's the only other victor in this regard). Long story short, I was blown away. I expected to be wowed, but instead I was mesmerized. Star-crossed. Hooked.

And guess what? You may just be seeing some cyanotype art jewelry pieces come out of this studio soon. They'll look similar to these exposures I did during the workshop:

 Leaps and Bounds

Pirouette Skirmish

 

Kewpie Gets Spit Curls

Escaped

And here's a little photo summary of what will become a draped cowl neck piece that I absolutely love (scroll down Dean's Workshops page a bit for more of the same):

 After all the sun's work and the rinsing is done,
I prepare the piece to be hung on the line to dry.
(Domestic Brenda--take a good, long look!)

 Reminds me of wash day at my Grandma Mae's.

 My Vally Ridge friend Janet Eskridge.
(We met at a Keith LoBue workshop at VRAS in 2008.
I'm the proud owner of three pieces of her work!)

Janet and the very wind-blown me.

A very BAD hair day (not you, Janet!) makes for a very GOOD art day!

[And I'm all done! I've earned a movie, but it will have to wait since it's now after midnight. It'll be nice to bank that movie reward for another time!]

A Peak at the Bench: Subject C-Carly

The idea of my art metals class taking a field trip to my basement studio came up during critique the other day (I'm taking advantage of the illustrious Sr. Rosemarita Heubner's last semester teaching [Mount Mary College, Milwaukee] before retirement). I not-so-jokingly confirmed "let's do it, but give me some time to dig a wider path!"

That said, I thought I'd offer my blog readers a similar field trip (one you don't have to trip through). Here's a peak at a project I've been working at my jewelry bench. It's 'a moment in time' from 'A Day in the Life.'

This little ditty continues a series I've started titled with letters of the alphabet (you may have seen V-Voracious and N-Newfangled in my book, Vintage Redux). This new one is a memory piece called C-Carly -- a memento to my husband's Brittany Spaniel who passed away when the boys were crawling and beginning to walk.

This project was spawned by finding a bric-a-brac spaniel head at a local antique store. I played with pairing it to other found objects and discovered that it fit in this UFO (unidentified found object) really well. However, it did need some sort of border to set it off from the grayness of the metal form. I liked the idea of using a zipper with only the teeth showing (ha! that phrase is quite dog-ly itself) and remembered the words of Michael deMeng in a workshop I took with him last fall -- anytime you repeat a pattern around an object, it sets it off and draws the viewer in.

Voila! Resin set the zipper, the dog, and the what's-it's-thing together. (To be honest, I didn't realize the zipper formed a C shape at first -- it was just too short to go all the way around. But, sometimes things just come together and this particular twist of fate cinched the name and it's place in the alphabet series!)

Next (because I wanted to moodle just how to tackle adding an iron wire bezel around this odd-shaped object), I decided on this old (watch?) chain for the necklace and cleaned it up with my wire brush. (I love my wire brush -- thank you Keith LoBue for introducing me to this fabulous tool).

Next time, I'll show you the results of taking iron wire to its limit (or "What Happens to a Bezel When You Putz with it Too Long") and (hopefully) C-Carly in finished form!