Goodbye etsy - hello BigCartel!

Yep.  Slowly moving my work off etsy and onto a cleaner, more modern site.

I'll admit that I finally got tired of seeing the same things on the landing page day after day, week after week, year after year, in spite of all of the complaints and ideas proposed to make etsy more sleek.  What began as a site for handmade and unique has finally turned into a site where everything is welcome to the point where anything handmade can mean truly artisan work created from start to finish by a single artist to cheap charms hung on a cheap chain.  Don't get me started on the dishes from the garage sale next door.  I just can't compete.  Worse, I can't be found.

So I find BigCartel.  Sleek, modern, easy to use.  Gone are the teens and tweens and any mention of Hello Kitty.  If these people were craft and art show people, I would be proud to have my tent parked next to theirs.

Not sure my rant is over but do take a look and cruise through the BigCartel site - even my own shop site, if you have a few minutes to spare.  Tell me what you think.  I think it's a good fit.

I'm out of words today . . .

 Honest.  Do you ever just run out of words?

I'm busy getting ready for a show in Omaha next weekend and I'm cranking out the juicy stuff and loving every minute of it.  Reminds me that what I really love is cutting and polishing my own stones and hand-fabrication - metalwork - fire - hammers.

So here you go.  A little bit of lavender color chalcedony cut from a band of blue agate, translucent and glorious.  Set in sterling silver and accented with a little drop bead of sunset color carnelian.  For my money, nothing is more satisfying than taking a little bit of pretty stone and making it prettier.

The end.

Oh, for sale.

Montana Agate . . .

Ahem.  Now that I've gotten over my 'pique.ed.ness' from the last post, I'm ready to move on.  You must be so grateful.

Back to the bench!

Instead of doing a wholesale clean up of the whole mess that taunts greets me every day, I decided to simply work myself through it.  Sure, my little space to work gets smaller and smaller but as I turn out lovely work like this, space increases day by day.

I'm in love with Montana Agate, have I told you?

I cut and polished some for a friend last year and this slivver was part of an edge that didn't have much promise as a primo piece but see?  A little lovin' and it turned out great.

Certainly on the milky side, the inclusions and explosions tend to the rusty color and accenting it with copper rings just seemed right.

Sports a pierced and cut out back for no other reason than I love it that way.

Beautiful.

Bubbling Blue Agate . . .

Yep, delish.

This was a little bit of leftover agate from a previous cut - typical of my lapidary, there are all kinds and sizes of leftovers.  Piles, actually.  Baggies full.

(I think the crossword puzzle word for leftover is ort so I call these gems Orts.  I'm a word freak.)

The little thing had no flash and barely color and I came just this close to cleaning the bench and tossing it but, long story longer, Ed was in the workspace we share in the garage shop and it was warm and I was in the mood to share and play nicely so I picked up an Ort and started polishing.

Oh baby, what a sweet piece it turned out to be!

Simply set and accented with twisted and vined sterling bails, a dyed Soocho Jade bead that picks up tiny flashes of burned red.  The necklace is a go-to piece for that blue jean and white tee outfit.

Buy me here.

Weekend inspiration . . .

Montana Agate : can you see the circling hawk as she is being dive-bombed by the sparrow?

I've said this before but it keeps coming up in my day-to-day - I am easily distracted and working on it should truly be Priority One.  As if I've been forced, I've spent the last few days at my lapidary bench, dusting and cleaning cobwebs and finally finishing a big project (at least big for me) since I have had a few slabs on my 'promise list' for almost a year now.  I cleaned up the workspace, turned on the radio and hunkered down for trimmin' and cabbin' and I didn't come up until it was over.  And now I find myself renewed and inspired once again to get back to what I truly love - lapidary and metalwork.

Here are the pieces of Montana Agate that have been staring at me for months on end, taunting me to start/finish them for Christine.  Plugged in to the Genie, I saw them through yesterday morning and off they went Priority Mail to Michigan.  I do hope she loves them but it's more important personally that they really did inspire me to stay at the bench just a little longer and I turned out four more gorgeous cabs that have me itching to get back into the metalshop tomorrow.  Sunday - an entire day at my metalwork.  Itching.

For the last several months I've been distracted by enamels and don't get me wrong here, I've thoroughly enjoyed learning and experimenting with them but I think I've been focusing too much on enamels alone and not how I might incorporate that into my 'true' work.  The work that gives me satisfaction and huge pride.  As I progress through the stone and metalwork, I hope to find a way to blend all of this newness into beautiful pieces of adornment.

Nebraska through and through

Take a look at these two lovely pieces of unnamed jasper that I cut and trimmed yesterday and tell me you don't see lovely scenes in both.  The shield shaped one clearly has a tornado reaching for the prairie and you can see the horizon spread out ahead of you - the Nebraska Sandhills.

Praire cloudburst

The smaller lozenge of a jasper cab is another prairie landscape, this time a summer rainshower as the sunshine on the right gives way to the isolated cloudburst.  (I do wish the picture was better but I'm trying to not be distracted by learning photography, I guess.  *wistful smile*)

Maybe another time I'll figure out why I'm so distracted by other projects and things and stuff ('Oh look . . . a kitty . . . ') but for now, I'm feeling more at ease with my direction once again.  Lord, keep my nose pointed forward.

A Triumph of Lichen revisited . . .

Maybe lichen isn't the word I'm looking for here. Maybe fungus is the word but that makes for an icky title for such a lovely stone.

Ocean Jasper is always gorgeous and I blogged about this little bit last week when I was finally able to get back to the lapidary bench for a few hours.  I turned out this stone and a handful of others that will slowly make their debut here in the next few days.

The patterns in the stone remind me so much of the roundish mold or some sort of fungus that grows on fallen logs and sometimes the side of the barn.  You people who read this and know what I'm talking about, please straighten me out as to what this is called.

This stone begged to be set with circle accents and it turned out particularly well, I think.  Okay, I had some issues with it but in the end, I like it.

Once in a while it's all about me . . .

The set up: Sunday night. 9:00pm. Bored. Too early for bed. Finished my book and refuse to turn on the tv. I excuse myself and head out to the pile of rock slabs in the shop where a cat joins me, watching from the windowsill. I find a little bit of Prehnite about the size of your little fingernail and I start to polish.

Monday morning: Using a scrap of silver from another project, I set this stone in a simple bezel, added a long loop for a bail. Change my mind and saw it off and use a tiny slice of tubing for a bail.

I am always surprised when a piece is in progress at how rough and messy it is, metal covered with glassy flux, bits of melted metal, sharp metal edges, a completely nasty piece. But in no time it's polished and hung from a snake chain, now around my neck. I marvel. I'm satisfied that I've fabricated a piece from beginning to end for my own pleasure.

Once in a while, it's all about me and what I want to make for my own creative satisfaction. No worries about finishing a handful of work for a gallery or listing on my etsy site. This is just mine. Unless someone falls in love with it while I'm wearing it. Then . . . awww . . . I'm a sucker for a compliment.

A rainy (and perfect) day for rock cutting . . .

Just to prove that it really was a heavy mist, light rain sort of Sunday and absolutely perfect for rock-cutting, here is the obligatory picture of Ink the Cat covered in light droplets. I say is was a perfect day for rock-cutting because it was too nasty to do anything outside yet it was a day you still wanted to accomplish something. Hence - rock-cutting.

Lisa 'Li'l Fish Studios' http://lilfishstudios.blogspot.com/ sent me a rock the size of your knee in a box of goodies earlier this month and the thing was too big to fit in my trimsaw. My friend Jan brought her 12" saw over and we set that noisy monster up in my newly finished side of Ed's garage shop. Here it is jammed into the feeder box with another piece of that common red stuff - glacial till - that acts as a jam to hold everything in place. I could have and should have glued it to a piece of 2x4 and pushed it through the saw using that method but I was wanting to get cutting and gluing requires drying time. And who has the time to wait for glue to dry . . . so I used my fingers. Little Miss Impatient.

These pics show the slow process of cutting into the stone and once again, you never know what you're gonna get. This according to my lapidary instructor of old who equates picking up nondescript 'parking lot' stones with picking up women in bars - you never know what you're gonna get. And again, I digress.

This stone had an agate look on the outside and I'm not sure exactly what we ended up with. I do know that it was hard as all get-out, took forever to slice and it did start to get prettier once I made a few slices into it. You can see that the 'steak fat look' turned to white and orange inclusions with some nice little dendrites. I'm anxious to polish a few bits to see what we've got here.

Just for laughs, here is a lovely shot of me in my Hefty Trash Bag. I'm too cheap to purchase a real rubberized lapidary apron so I have to go this route to keep from soaking my clothes through and through. Yes, a realy Hefty Trash Bag with a drawstring hem.

In the next week as I polish these little guys into something sweet, I'll post the pics for you all to see how fun it is to discover beauty inside of the Rock with No Name. Maybe we'll call it Bowesite . . .

What I like to wake up to . . .

Two sales! Just when I start to lament that I haven't had an etsy sale in October, I get two in one day. However it comes, I like it.

I love this piece of pale cream Willow Creek Jasper and it polished beautifully. Like a pencil line drawing on a creamy paper with a tiny sun rising in the upper corner, or maybe a little coffee spill from the artist's cup, this will be gorgeous on a warm, winter wool coat, maybe a jacket, and I've loved it for a long time. Bye . . . sniff . . . I miss 'em all.

The other little necklace is one of the first pieces of apple green Prehnite that I cut and polished earlier this summer. It glows, I swear. It has its own life. On the back I've punched a pattern of a little constellation from a galaxy far, far away. Another simple setting, it will be perfect hanging in the hollow of your throat.

Bon chance, little pieces!

Enjoy your new home! Write!

For my friend Lil Fish Studios . . .

I am so lucky.

Lucky to have learned lapidary work, to have learned metalwork, to have friends who will send me little rocks to 'prettify', to have two healthy hands to create and lucky to have a creative mind that works.

Here's what you get when you use all of the skills to create something of beauty - two little necklaces to cherish. And both of them are on their way to Lisa at Lil Fish Studios as a 'thank you' for sending that sweet box of rocks to Nebraska.

Lovely.

you never know what you're gonna get . . .

My new friend Lisa (Lil Fish Studios) sent me a little boxful of all sizes of Lake Superior Agates last week and here's what I uncovered inside the stones . . .

Sweet, no?

Where the magic happens . . . Jill, for you

I probably should have posted a pic of the Genie in my last post to show exactly what my lapidary equipment is. This little guy really does a fantastic job, I think, although there are much larger and more complicated machines.

There are six wheels in six progressively finer grits as noted in my previous post, the finest being a polishing grit, two spitters to keep the wheels wet as I grind and a lamp so I can see what I'm doing, and a magnifying glass for those of us over 40.

And the end result of the piece of prehnite I polished earlier this week - made into a sweet necklace.

(a daylily pair- had to sneak that in)

Yummy stuff . . . .

There is no better word for this material - yummy. I've been looking for prehnite cabs that I could afford or slabs of this sweet stuff and I finally got my lapidary instructor to give some up. Thank you, Captain Agate.

Eight beauties - six slabs and two heels - that I can't wait to work on and I will be posting the little works in progress. If you're interested, join me.

I'm too excited . . . .

I was going to try to post blog entries that were organized, followed a chronological order of my metalworking journey, attempt to be informative and probably just plain boring. {{yawn}} But today I took a little sliver of agate that I bought at the Lincoln Gem and Mineral Show last Sunday and I'm so excited about how the little guy turned out that I had to post it.

I usually cut and polish all of my own stones (you can find those sweet gems on my flickr site) but I came across a handful of Holley Blue Agate and this little sliver was calling to me. I swear, this piece absolutely glows. Sweet, huh?

It measures about an inch long and I've accented it with a 4mm peridot bead. (I know, I hate mixing millimeters and inches, but . . . . ). Love it. Can't wait to wear it. I have three other pieces that I think will be set and sold. I can't keep everthing.