Yearly Archives: 2021

1″ diameter, glass and ink

It’s been raining and raining, which makes our baby plants really happy, but leaves me a bit melancholy.  The water is pooling and swirling and being beautiful as long as it stays out of our house and garage.  I had a chance to play with alcohol inks last week for the first time, and saw that they can make amazing watery swirls. I’ve been experimenting with them on different surfaces and testing ways to seal them.  So between the rain and my tests, this week you get to see not a mosaic pendant, but a pendant made from alcohol ink on a white glass nugget sealed with resin.  It looks to me like one of the many puddles along my street.  

1″ x1″, glass and found objects

I taught a mixed media mosaics class at Snow Farm earlier this week and put together a couple of pendants as we played with Apoxie Sculpt and all of the bits and pieces that I had brought along.  The stained glass that I used for the background reminded me of the night sky, and the central stone is a ring from a gumball machine that I flattened and cut. A few days ago I came from Snow Farm to Taconic State Park, where the stormy skies have actually been as dazzling as the stained glass in the pendant. So this week’s pendant is a nod to the beauty of the Cosmos.   I’ve given it a name that implies it’s the first in a series because I have a funny feeling there will be more.

1″ diameter, glass and found objects

I heard that unprecedented numbers of people are quitting their jobs right now.  The pandemic made us all pause and take good hard look at what we do, how we do it, and why we do it.  While the process has been painful, it seems like the changes that it’s brought about for a lot of people are positive.  My family has been taking apart an old typewriter, and today I decided to start to use the keys.  Until I looked closely, I hadn’t noticed that the question mark and the comma were on the same key.  It seems like a message from the universe… pause, and question.  

 2″ x 2″, found objects

I’ve been holding onto this board for almost a year, waiting to put it into a pendant because it has a fantastic shine to it, and a great graphic quality.  But alone it was too new, too gold and green.  And the bezel with its fake gold color was too yellow.  Then I found the silver and black earring that’s now at the top.  With its patina of age it calmed down the piece and made it complete.  I’ll keep this one away from the silver polish and let the real precious metal lose its shine while the fake versions can glow and reflect to their heart’s content.

1″ diameter, terra cotta and found objects

My studio is full of bits and pieces. The smaller I work, the harder it is to throw out what I sweep up off the floor.  When I finish a stained glass window I have pieces left for mosaic.  When I finish a wall mosaic I have scraps left for pendants.  And they’re all so beautiful.  This pendant is made from a metal washer that was on the floor and ceramic tiles. It’s so satisfying to turn something that was once garbage into something new.

1″ diameter, stone and ceramic

This pendant is in honor of the new patio that’s taking shape in front of my studio. Today they placed the last stone to complete the brick spiral at the center, and it finally feels real. It seems like we always come up with design ideas that make contractors look at us like we’re nuts. But once they’re built we love them, so it’s worth being quirky.

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.

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. 

2″ x .5″, found objects