Monthly Archives: April 2021

1.5″ x 1.5″, slate and glass

This week has been rocky, with huge ups and downs as the kids returned to school.  The ups have been wonderful and the downs have been tough. The driveway that will become a patio is still being filled with truckloads or gravel, and there’s a mountain to climb over if we want to reach the back yard.  But among the rocks there are flowers peeking out, and the ever-hearty chocolate mint is growing along the side of the garage, preparing to flower later in the summer.  This pendant sits at the crossroad between rock and flower, sharp and jagged if you look at it once, and soft and promising if you look at it again.

.5″ x 2″, dichroic glass

From a snowy Massachusetts we drove down to Washington DC, where the weather is warm and lovely. It’s a bit rainy, but in a way that just barely dulls the colors of spring and makes the light sparkle. This pendant captures some of the shine and the emerging colors of flowers, sunsets and all the other wonders that have been hidden under the ground or outside the bounds of the house all winter.

1″ x 2.5″, found objects

At every scale, there’s a lot going on right now.  At the scale of our little household, there are painters, a back-hoe, carpenters in our yard, and even more construction at the house next to ours.  It’s loud, it’s exciting, and yet, we’re in here typing away quietly at our computers and having meetings while the kids are in school (!).  This moment, when the kids are in school, we’re still working from home, and the new variants haven’t yet hit our classrooms, is a pretty amazing little eye of the storm.  This week’s pendant has disparate elements.  Different shapes, patterns and colors all thrown together, but at the bottom is the black glass pebble, the eye of the storm.

1″ x 2″, slate

I’ve been a little bit obsessed with slate lately.  I love how it breaks irregularly to look like land masses. I love its subtly varied colors. I love how different it looks on edge and flat.  I love how it combines with glass and ceramic.  Our yard is being torn up this week and what did the first shovel-fulls find?  Slate!  It’s probably from a roof tile that fell off years ago.  I dug through the dirt pile last night to rescue the beautiful broken bits, and this pendant is made from some of them.  Straight-up slate this time. No glass, no ceramic, no distractions. 

1″ x 1.5″, found objects and fused glass

I’m having trouble being systematic and intentional in my pendants these days. Everything is about balance, but an off-kilter, about-to-fall kind of balance, like my week.  I put this pendant together by picking through my bits and pieces and finding things that shine (some dichroic glass that I’d fused onto black, some iridescent beads) and it has that look of fancy jewels just barely visible poking up from the mud.  I do love a treasure hunt, so this is how it’ll stay.