Empty Nest

For whatever reason (I’ve yet to discover a definitive one), I don’t tend to design earrings with my own enamels. But being a brand new year in the midst of a very strange season, I decided it was time to mix things up a bit and change all that…at least for today!

I recently designed a flurry of bird enamels (or maybe that should be a flock?) for a themed show and tried my hand at some enamels that were more like portraits than my typical outlined “cartoon” style pieces. Much to my surprise, the process of making small translucent strokes, firing, adding another layer of strokes, firing (repeat ad infinitum), was somehow mesmerizing. However, having no painting background, my poor birds, although changing appearance with each layer, were not looking at all like what I had intended after even after a half dozen firings! Perhaps they were better kept for my own designs, where I could take my time figuring out how to bring them to life. Which brings me (finally!) to today’s earrings…

Here’s how my birds started their journey after cutting copper sheet and laying down the first base coats (the poor things would have a quite a journey of color ahead of them before they left the nest):

 

If you are familiar with my earrings, you know that I don’t tend to do anything simple – I guess it’s just not how I am wired. But I wanted beads that would complement the birds without distracting from them (after all, they had already been forced through quite a metamorphosis). I think I found the perfect match in a beautiful etched pair from Regis Teixera, and added some leather flowers (how cool is that?) to keep in line with a more rustic vibe, rich amber-hued Czech glass flowers and rings, and an assortment of brass caps. I really like how these turned out, but I also am aware of just how much I have to learn (I would greatly appreciate any painting tips you might have)! It’s difficult to know just when to stop...

Who knows? Maybe I’ll have a few more pairs of bird earrings to add to the flock by next time. But for now, these will be available in my etsy shop, TwinklingOfAnEye later today

You can regularly find other new earrings in my fb group.

Thanks for spending a part of your day with me. See you in a few weeks! :-)

Vivid!

Hi, everyone!  This past month has been a tough one, with a major household upheaval and the death of a beloved family pet.  💔   So I'll keep this short, but I'd love to show you all some recent earrings.  

The focus of the first pair (below) is a classic polymer clay design by Helena Benkoczka, pretty stylized feathers in violet, fuchsia, purple, and gold.  I paired the feathers with deep-blue lampwork glass rondelles, fuchsia Czech glass rondelles and Swarovski bicones, and gold accent beads, and tied the earrings together with fuchsia linen thread.

Kristi Bowman-Gruel's vividly colorful dotted-and-swirled painted copper charms (below) are so colorful all by themselves that I couldn't resist adding even more color and texture.  Even the little green Czech discs are dusted with gold, and Beth Mellor's rosy rondelles have subtle little dots.  A little over the top?  Well, maybe...  😉💗

Thank you so much for reading!  I'll be back in a couple of weeks.  💗

xoxo
Meridy

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Violet Dream

Sometimes I struggle to put together a pleasing combination of beads and other times I know right away what to do. These earrings fell into the latter category.  I had fun making these floral ceramic earrings charms a month or so ago.Then last week I received some beautiful lampwork glass spacers by Susan Spurling of Flame Madein. Right away I could see that they belonged with my violet ceramic charms.

I had some small lampwork glass beads, by Beads And Botanicals, in my stash which matched perfectly. I brought everything together with Sterling silver wire, which I crisscrossed across the front of the top beads. I love the result.  They are perfectly dreamy! 

Linda Landig Jewelry

Mirror Image

Am I fussy ? I'm always extra happy when I find earring components that are 'handed'  - with an identifiable left and right. And being brought up at the seaside I'm a sucker for anything sea themed; having just booked our summer holiday it was even more on my mind. So I was chuffed to find these fab ceramic pieces from Lindsay Drake. Not only handed, but the most beautiful, subtle colours of honey and green with edges that make them look like old, burnt parchment.

  

With the starfish pair, I used lovely etched lampwork beads by Josephine Wadman that just shout sea and black volcanic sand. Like a greek island sunset - Santorini maybe. The urchin caps are Vintaj copper.

These soft, glossy green ammonite pieces are reflected with tiny roman glass rondelles and turritella agate beads - such an amount of pattern on such small things.  

These would take you nicely through spring and into summer. Both pairs are in my Etsy shop now.
See you in a couple of weeks - keep well and hope the weather is kind to you, wherever in the world you are.

Lindsay x



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Discs and Circles...

...and DOTS!  Happy New Year, everyone!

I hope your 2019 is going well!  💗

These colorful, happy, and whimsical earrings were so much fun to make!  I've just listed them, and their sunniness is welcome after the rain and windstorms we've had here in Sacramento the last few days!  It's been glooooomy!

I bought the wonderful ombre dotted charms by Nicola Morse quite a while ago, and found their dotty match (the glorious golden hollow beads by Beth Mellor) by chance a number of months ago.  I had commissioned Beth to make me some beads to go with other components I had, and she made those beads as well as many more...including the wonderful dotted beauties that ended up in these earrings.  I love how these earrings came together by serendipity.  💗

To finish the earrings, I added a pair of small orchid glass discs (also by Beth), golden Swarovski rondelles nestling in little gold leafy bead caps, and beautiful 4-mm faceted purple garnet coins.  I wrapped everything together with gold-filled wire and hung them on my Two Trees gold-filled ear wires.

These earrings can be found at Two Trees Studio, here.

Wishing you all sunny days--or at least sunny days of the heart.  💗

Thanks for reading.  I'll be back in two weeks with some new things!

xoxo
Meridy

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A Lick and a Promise

"A lick and a promise" is a phrase that my mom used to use to describe making our house presentable now and doing a full housecleaning later.  I'm afraid that my post today is going to be a little bit like that--short and hopefully presentable!--since I've caught my grandson's cold/bronchitis.  I'm not feeling so great, and on top of that, the cough/cold medicine has zombie-fied me to the point where all I really want to do is stare into space 😵 or curl up with a blankie and pillow. 💗

But I still wanted to share these new earrings with you since they just feel so much like

summer to me, with all the flowers and aqua and lavender!  The lovely blue-and-purple

striated-and-dotted lampie beads are by Terry Turner of Silverfish Designs, and

Raida Disbrow of Havana Beads made the exquisite enameled charms.  I added Czech

rondelles and discs, in purple and aqua; leafy copper bead caps; tiny aqua Swarovski

bicones; and even smaller seed beads, also in aqua.  Thank you, Raida and Terry, for

making these gorgeous beads and components that allow me to make beauty in turn.  💗

Thank you all for being understanding.  I promise to be back next time

(May 24, I do believe) with an entire "housecleaning."  😊💗

xoxo

Meridy

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Coronas, Crowns, & Diadems...

Lately I've been making earrings finished off with small crowns, or coronas...

These earrings can be purchased at Two Trees Studio, here.  

The earrings above, "Night Gardens," are new in my shop, made with gorgeous lampwork rondelles by Terry Turner and beautiful flower headpins by Pati Walton.  I'm not really sure what has caused my current infatuation with these little crowns in recent earrings.  I'm not sure we ever really know what moves us to create in our own particular ways, but I think that's part of the fun.  I like the idea of letting creativity have its way!  I do know that I love these little bead caps with their open-wire scallops--there's a gentle femininity to them--and I really enjoy using them to cradle colorful little beads, usually Czech glass rondelles in lots of colors.

The earrings above are brand new, also with beads by Terry and headpins by Pati.   I had an awful time getting a good photo of them because it had been raining here for days, and the gloom left me with not enough light to do justice to Terry's beautiful lampwork beads...but the rains finally stopped and the sun came out!    😊 

The pair above is also new, made with Terry Turner's beads and gorgeous copper pieces by one of my all-time favorite artisans, Kristi Bowman-Gruel.  This time my "crowns" are lavender-dyed jade beads with bead caps made like flower petals rather than scallops--though you might notice that my favorite scalloped bead caps still make an appearance!  😉

I hope you're all having a great start to 2018.  Love and best wishes for a happy and healthy New Year to you all, and I will see you in a couple of weeks!  💗

xoxo

Meridy

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Second Guessing

I guessing that I'm not the only jewelry designer who holds on to components for long periods of time before making something (beautiful!) with them.  I mean, there are always good reasons for not immediately making something as soon as a gorgeous bead or headpin comes into my eager hands.  Maybe I have a bunch of other designs stacked up on the runway.  Or perhaps I can't find the perfect components to complete what I envision.  Or--and I confess this does happen from time to time--I may not have the vaguest notion what to do with my beloved purchase...and the lovely little piece of art has to sit with me for a spell while I figure it out.  :)

In this case, the lovely pieces of art were Pati Walton's amazing headpins.  I at least knew what I wanted my earrings to be:  long, lean stackers with a ceremonial tribal atmosphere.  Since Pati's headpins were so beautifully decorated already, I thought that I should probably keep the rest of the components fairly neutral.  But nothing "neutral" I tried worked.  Black beads, pink beads, even purple beads on top were just kind of...there.  They were too neutral.

I HAD considered a pair of beads, cute little things by Deborah Crow Roesly that I'd been saving for just the right thing...

...and I kept taking them out of the drawer where they lived and looking at them, then putting them back.  No, I thought each time, they're just too busy paired with those headpins.  So more time went by.  

Then one day I picked up the headpins and pulled Deborah's dotted purple beads out of the drawer again and started putting them together with some of my favorite copper beads.   When I was finished, they looked pretty much the way they do in these photos, minus the little pale pink Swarovskis at the top.  And I set those prototypes aside again.

But by the time I pulled the nearly finished earrings out to look at them the next time, weeks later, I realized that I couldn't really imagine them any other way.  The dotted purple beads looked like they'd always belonged with the amazing, colorful dotted headpins.  I'd finally stopped second-guessing myself, so then I finished the earrings...my kind-of-amazing ceremonial tribal stackers.  :)   

Thanks so much for reading!  

I'll see you all in a couple of weeks!  

xoxo

Meridy

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Gold Fish

My apologies for writing this post so late in the day. I've been under the weather and totally zonked out on the day/date! Last year we bought (as a gift to my in-laws) a really nice wall clock that also shows the day and the date all in one spot. Both my hubby and I keep saying that we should get one for ourselves, as one day just seems to seamlessly blend with the next.

Does this happen to you too, at home? Not having a set Monday-Friday type of schedule really messes with us at times lol

Without further delay, here's the earrings I wanted to share with you today :)

I call them Gold Fish, although not quite in the traditional sense of the name, but you get my drift:

I found this cool pair of almost pink-gold opal-like artisan lampwork beads in my stash (I apologize, I do not remember who I purchased these from, as it was many years ago)... but their color played so well with my handmade Polymer Clay "Sunset" color-scheme Tropical Fish charms that I had to use them. I wanted to pair them with gold-filled wire and beautiful TierraCast (lead-free) gold-tone pewter. They are suspended on Niobium Ear Wires.

I wanted to showcase the gorgeous wispy feel of the lampwork glass beads, so I decided to simply suspended by the side instead of the more traditional 'up-down' direction. I'm really pleased how they turned out - I'm a big fan of pink and gold together :)

What are you favorite color combinations for Fall and Winter coming up? Any favorites? I'm really attracted to rich plums and blues, with copper...

I'm going to list these in my Etsy shop by the weekend. I'm catching up on a few other things first. Chronic Illnesses have been ruling our schedule for the past 16 months, gotta go with the flow at the moment.

Thank you for reading!
Happy up-coming Long Weekend to my fellow Canucks ;)

Cheers,
Nathalie Lesage
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and The Crafty Tribe Etsy Shop

La Serenissima

La Serenissima - the 'most serene republic' of Venice. Unbelievably, it was only two weeks ago I was there with my sister (her 65th birthday treat), my brother in law and him indoors. It's the time of the Bienniale, and the city is full of art installations.

Do you find the same - once you get home, back to the routines of work, child care or whatever takes up your busy day, holidays seem to fade quickly? Thank heavens photographs enable you to relive the highlights.

I'd intended to write this week's blog about my visit and spent the days searching for inspiration for the earrings.

The first thing that strikes you in Venice is the colours.  The lagoon and canals - the blues and greens of the water, the black and gold of the gondolas lined up at sunset ready for the evening; and the buildings lining the Grand Canal - many of them old palazzos, some still family homes, some hotels.  Terracotta, sepia, peach, cream, white. The green of the algae where building meets water. Every one majestic.

              The colours are alive in my head. And in my photos. Still, no idea for earrings!

We arrive home to a pile of mail, among which were packages from Linda Younkman and Patricia Ritchie. Have a brew, open the packages. Never mind unpacking - that can wait!   And there they were, waiting to be put together. In Linda's enamels were all the colours I had been looking at for the last four days - and the black waves - they were the gondolas, lined up at sunset, the moon rising over the grand Canal. Echoed perfectly by Patricia's lampwork.

 

I'll be back in  three days, as I'm covering a spare day - and I'll be looking at another important and very old tradition in Venice - masks. Hope to see you then.

 

Lindsay 

 

 

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These Earrings Had to Have Chain

Lately in some of my earring designs I've been searching out different elements and colors than I usually favor, mostly as a way to push myself out of my comfort zone a little, which in turn seems to help to keep my creativity sparking.  

This week's earrings feature a pair of Nicola Morse's brass paint effect-and-resin charms:

The charms themselves are Different Element One:  I rarely use gold or gold-tone metal.  Even so, they're so beautiful that I couldn't resist them!  I decided to pair them with lampwork glass--glossy blue discs by Helen Chalmers and small streaky mango-colored rondelles by Beth Mellor. 

Different Element Two was kind of randomly imposed: I'd decided that these earrings had to have chain, something I've almost never used in my earrings.  Somehow the delicate gold-filled chain I found finishes these earrings perfectly.  I used gold-filled head pins to wire-wrap 2-mm round turquoise beads and 11/0 gold-plated seed beads to each segment of the chain and hung them all from gold-filled jump rings. Hey, once I decided to go gold, I went all out!   😉

They're long, lightweight, and swingy.  They'll be in my shop soon.  

Thanks so much for reading about my adventures in golden charms and chains.  I'll be back in a few weeks!  💗

xoxo

Meridy

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Vintage Blackberry

I've always liked the jewelry of earlier centuries, which I guess shouldn't be too much of a surprise given that my formal education focused on the Medieval period.  Oddly, though, I'd never really been interested in making vintage-inspired jewelry until now.

You see, a while back I was in need of beads, and I found some beauties in Serena Thomas's Etsy shop, Taneres. Though I usually don't use this type of bead, these lovely, vintage-looking violet-pink-and-yellow beads...

...really appealed to me, so I bought them (well, of course I did!).  Then a week or so later I found these porcelain earring components by Mari Carmen Rodriguez Martinez:  

It was the proverbial match made in heaven!  The colors of Mari Carmen's beautiful charms worked perfectly with Serena's beads, and their shape provided a lovely frame for some very pretty Swarovski "Blackberry" pearls.

Also featured in the earrings are TierraCast antiqued copper bead caps and Swarovski Crystal Lilac Shadow bicone beads. 

I'm really enjoying exploring new things these days.  I hope you're having a wonderful time with whatever creative path you're on.

I'm heading out of town tomorrow, but I'll be back in a few days.

Love to all...and I'll see you in two weeks. 

xoxo

Meridy

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The Tree of Life

Tree of Life, Azerbaijan, 17th century

I've always been drawn to the symbol of the Tree of Life.  It seems to have been around forever in one form or another, in every culture.  It's an archetypal image, a constantly recurring motif in literature, painting, and mythology, symbolizing (among other things) the union and balance of the upper and lower worlds and all they represent.

It's taken countless forms, of course, as each culture in each period of time has expressed it based on whatever beliefs they had, in whatever mediums they had to use.  It's timeless--perhaps even eternal.  The Norse called it "The World Tree," and given its ubiquity and its many faces, it really is.

Tree of Life, Aberdeen (Scotland) Bestiary, early 12th Century

By the 12th century, in the West the Tree of Life was most often depicted in Christian iconography of the time as The Tree of Jesse, illustrating the lineage of Jesus.

Tree of Jesse, late 12th century.  The head of the House of Jesse was considered the royal forebear of Jesus and in these depictions was most often shown lying down beneath the tree itself, with Jesus and Mary in the center and other relations on the spreading branches.

Celtic Tree of Life (one of so many!)

Tree of Life, Spain, modern day

These are just a tiny sample of the endless ways the Tree of Life has been interpreted over the centuries.  I would never claim to have created anything iconic in my earring offering today; instead I created a very simple and colorful tribute to the Tree of Life, less than 2 inches long.  

  

Kristi Bowman-Gruel made the beautiful Tree of Life charms, and sky-blue lampwork rondelles, small green Czech glass rondelles, and tiny Swarovski crystals echo their colors. 

The earrings can be found here.  

I loved spending this time with you all--for one thing I got to share some seldom-used knowledge about Medieval iconography--yay!  I hope to see you again in two weeks.  :)

 

xoxo

Meridy

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Earth Rebirth

In my last post here at Earrings Everyday, I wrote about how much I was yearning for spring to arrive.  Well, it's finally here, officially at least, and for some of us the weather is even getting warmer and sunnier!  So I thought I'd make earrings that would reflect the beginning of spring, that period of rebirth and renewal, when the birds are building nests for their families-to-be, the flowers are starting to bloom, and the trees are leafing out.

I looked through my cache of earring components and opened my box of treasures by Helena Benkoczka of ARETObeadsjewellry, who (as I'm sure you know) makes uniquely beautiful earring charms.  I found just what I wanted:  a lovely pair of tribal teardrop charms in soft turquoise and purple that reminded me of the Easter celebrations of my childhood.

To go with the charms, I picked lovely streaky transparent purple lampwork rondelles by Beth Mellor of Beeboo and pretty turquoise discs made for me by my friend Barbara Steffen of Fire Spirit Beads.

I added tiny purple seed beads and turquoise jump rings, and wrapped and knotted everything together with turquoise waxed linen cording.  These pretty, softly colored earrings are the result.

Thanks so much for reading--I'll see you in two weeks!

xoxo
Meridy

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