1.25″ x2.25″, copper and steel
This season the flowers are in bloom everywhere, under tress, around the pond, peeking out from beneath the welding barn where I’ve been all week…but this bloom was found in the scrap at the bottom of the plasma cutter table- steel and copper speckled with spatters from all of our designs. It’s been a wonderful week, and this little guy is a reminder of all the fun with metal.
1″ x 2″, glass and found objects
It might seem like a bit of a leap from this pendant to snails, but let me explain…
We have a terrarium full of snails that we originally found in our yard. We feed them scraps of food that would otherwise go in the compost, and every time we remember to dampen their cage, they lay eggs under the water bowl. This week another batch of baby snails emerged from beneath the water bowl and started to slowly climb the walls and explore their habitat. They start out as a mass of tiny little babies, like a pile of beads, and then they grow into rice-size snails and then into teenage beansprout-sized snails before becoming their mature, full coin size. This pendant uses millefiori massed like the baby snails, huddled in the spaces where they can hide until they’re ready to explore the world. Our snails are cool, but they’re not as colorful.
1″ x 1″, glass and marble
I cut these pieces using a hammer and hardie, a mosaic artist’s traditional tool; a blade set into a tree stump, and a hammer with a straight narrow end. When you place stone or glass on the thin edge of the hardie and tap the hammer on top, the piece splits with almost no effort. I like the way the tool focuses all of your energy on the task at hand. I hope the process, and this pendant, can represent a new focus of my energy on each task at hand.
2″ x .5″, found objects
Watching my daughter enter the pre-teen years makes me think about my own, with the trappings of childhood still filling my room while I longed for independence. We just got her a sim card for an old cell phone so that she can call and text when she’s walking home from school with friends. It’s a real step toward independence, but with a string still tied to home. This pendant is made from sim cards and my old brownie pin, new and old symbols of that in-between period. I threw in some screws to hold the fragile balance all together.