Yearly Archives: 2022

1′ x 1.5 “, found objects

This is the season when a  drop pf sunshine can change the course of a whole day. It’s the deciding factor between sitting snuggled up under a blanket or venturing out into the cold.  It’s the difference between wanting ice cream or hot chocolate.  And this particular drop of sunshine is made from one of the treasures in a whole box of sunshine that was gifted to me for the holidays. I was given a wonderful mishmash of old jewelry and watches by my mom and my friend’s mom to reimagine in the new year.  I’m looking forward to hours of fun!

1″ x 1.2″, found objects

Tonight is the 5th night of Hanukkah, and we haven’t been super consistent about lighting the candles, but all the things around me that glow remind me of flames. The stone in this pendant catches the light in a way that looks like it’s holding a flame inside. I love the way that its original oval setting frames it, but by adding black adhesive and another small metal finding, the red looks deeper and brighter than ever.

1″x 2.5″, found objects

For most people, holidays are about something religious, but for me, it’s really all about the food. Of course, I do love decorations, and I love being together with family and friends, and the excuse to pull out fancy clothes that only get worn for special occasions.  But mostly, it’s about the food.  Since we don’t celebrate Christmas but we do have other winter holidays, our holiday season gets stretched out and enjoyed even longer. This pendant too is stretched out to include elements that represent decorations, music and, central to it all, food.

1″ x 1.5″, wire and stone

These days it feels like everything’s spinning, and I’m going in literal circles around the city, around the region and around my house. There are moments of calm, and I’m so grateful for them, but they feel like the eye of the storm, and I know that within an hour the spinning will start again.

1″ x 1.5″, glass and found objects

A friend is moving, and she’s decided to have a zero-waste move, throwing nothing out as she packs.  It’s created a tremendous amount of extra work for her, and taken so much time, but it’s a nice goal.  Last week she presented me with a tiny tin and a baggie of the last remnants of the move, the smallest bits of plastic and glass that no one else wanted.  So here a few of them have found a home. The central plastic ring, the tiny black cap, and both of the artificial gems are now finding a second life in this pendant.  (oh, and if you’re in the Boston area, come pick up some of these pendants at the Celebrate Newton holiday market this Sunday!)

1″ diameter, found objects

The first piece I added to this pendant was a gear. It fit perfectly, nestling into the outer ring. But there were spaces left between each tooth. I found beads that nestled right into the spaces, filling them completely. And with a little hunting I found beads and rivets to fill the space in the center, nestling the smallest rivet into the larger one. The pendant became my 1-inch version of feeling nestled and well-protected, especially as the weather gets colder and windier outside.

2″ x .5″, ceramic tiles

I spent this week at the enormous annual conference of the American Public Health Association. Thousands of people in a big convention center trying to rush from one end of the building to another to catch the sessions and speakers that they’re most interested in. Unlike in the regular world, everyone already speaks public health acronyms and believes in prevention, but still, there are surprising divides between the people who attend.  It feels like the tiles in this pendant, all made of the same stuff, painted the same family of colors, but different shapes and with some space still between them, all trying to line up straight enough to accomplish collective impact.

1″x  .75″, found objects

As you know by now, I love the natural patinas that materials develop over time.  Every time I used to go to Europe I’d remember that the time scale for buildings and roads and aqueducts was so different there.  The finish on the stones was more worn, the metals more corroded.  Then, going to India, the time scale jumped again.  Instead of decades old in the US or hundreds of years old in Europe, things that we still walked by could be thousands of years old.  This pendant combines an antique cuff link from the US with an antique coin from India.  Each is beautiful and old in its own way.  Now I’m watching my own body age at the same time I watch my grandmother’s 98 year-old body age.  The scales are different, and her patina of wrinkles and softness is more advanced than mine.

1″ x 2″, glass

I think a lot about what’s next; planning for the future and trying to optimize.  And sometimes the number of things I have to do each day feels like an over-commitment, filling every hour and making it hard to change course.  But the flip side of being so busy is that it keeps me grounded.  As long as I’m stuck somewhere good, maybe it’s OK to not be moving.  The tiny recycled glass tiles in this pendant are stuck in a green-tinted cement. As long as they don’t struggle against it, maybe it’s cozy to be stuck so tight.

.5″ x 2″, dichroic glass

I had some complicated thoughts about pendant designs for this week, but the colors of the leaves on every block are so vibrant that I couldn’t get them out of my head and they snuck into the pendant. I love the way the dichroic glass reflects the light and makes the colors glow just like the sun shining through the leaves of the very brightest trees.

2″x .5″, glass and found objects

In some small parts of my life I have all my ducks in a  row; I arrive to meetings on time, I prepare materials in advance, I (usually) stay up to date on entries to my public health job’s database. But in other areas of my life there’s just constant change, and it feels like the sands are always shifting beneath me. In person, this pendant shifts colors as the dichroic glass on the left side reflects the light around it. As it moves it changes.  And yet the small pile on the right stays in place, precarious but balanced.

.75″ x 1.25″, found objects

This summer brought a long drought,  but the rains have definitely come.  While I feel awfully down and dreary on gray, wet days, I’ve been trying to see the beauty in the rain itself and in the plants that grow in its wake. This raindrop-shaped pendant has four golden drops inside.

1″ x 1.25″, found objects

So much of my work is slow and plodding.  Step by small step projects come together, and prevention initiatives almost never show forward progress, usually just helping us avoid collective backsliding.  But sometimes I work on something for long enough that I can see a small change.  The piece at the bottom of this pendant is a cursive “L” from an old printing press.  I love the perspective of looking at it from the side; the whole bulk of the piece and the whole apparatus that stands behind it, just to support that tiny curvy raised surface touching ink and then the paper.  Such a big effort for such a small mark.  But when you put many letters together their power is tremendous.

1″ x 1.5″, found objects

I was on an airplane this week, and at a party. I was even at two different outdoor meetings with real people!  There’s still a hesitancy   around handshakes and hugs, and we did get an email after one of the meetings to say that someone there tested positive for COVID, but it feels like we’re slowly filling in the 6-foot gaps that we’ve been maintaining for the last two years.  This pendant, made from super cool rivets that I found at a super cool creative reuse center in Seattle, shows the view from above as we start to move together inch by inch.

1″ x 1.5″, glass and found objects

As an alternative to crystal, the modern material to gift on a 15th anniversary is a watch, representing all the time we’ve spent together.  As we breezed through our anniversary in a  place where I could finally take break from looking at my watch and just relax, I decided that better than a working clock to represent our time together, would be one of the faces from the watches I’ve disassembled.  This watch pendant, with no mechanism, is truly timeless.

.5″ 1.5″, found objects

This week is my 15th wedding anniversary, and I looked up the material that’s supposed to be exchanged. It turns out it’s crystal, to represent “pure and sparkling love”.  I appreciate that this year’s sparkle is supposed to come from glass, not from a precious stone or metal.  And goodness knows I love working with lead and glass, so leaded crystal should be a shoe-in.  But what I found for the pendant is even simpler cut glass.  Costume jewelry is more my style, so this is a costume jewelry nod to our anniversary and a recognition that sparkle doesn’t have to come with a high price!

.5″ x 1″, found objects

We held a Harry Potter-themed birthday party yesterday, complete with some very yellow and gingery good luck potions.  That was all happening outside, while in the kitchen I had the makings for my favorite late-summer potion: fresh peach sauce.   I got a big basket of juicy, over-ripe peaches from the local farmer’s market and eyed them (and ate them) until I had time to cut them up and cook them down into the sweetest, tastiest sauce ever.  I have it cooling in jars now, but have already devoured almost a whole jar.  This pendant includes a shape that reminds me of the vials that Harry Potter and his friends store their potions in.  Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a necklace with an ever-ready drink of peach sauce waiting for me to get hungry?

1″ x 2″, found objects

My studio is a jumble, and my calendar is a jumble, with bits and pieces of the too-many projects that I would like to finish before the school year begins all spread out over my surfaces. Some have actual deadlines, and others have drifted to the top of my list only to make room for the projects that are already on my calendar for the fall.  I tried hard to sit down today to make a sophisticated pendant, but what came out was a jumble.  I suppose it only makes sense.  I listened to a podcast today about how our gut microbiome is intimately connected to our mental health.  I think the navigability of my studio is intimately connected to my artistic health.

1″x 1.5″,  glass

Why is it that we always talk bout downward spirals and not about upward spirals?  I understand the physics of it, but emotionally, I think I’m ready to notice some upward spirals.  It seems like the summer workload is slowing down a bit, and there’s room for a bit of spiraling into learning and making and relaxing.  The heatwave broke this week and the air is finally brisk again. Maybe, for the first time ever, September and October will feel like an upward spiral into fall instead of a downward spiral into winter.

1″x 2″, glass and steel

One of the things I love about my plasma cutter is the sputter it makes as the steel melts and bubbles before being blown away. These little treasures are cut-offs from a lantern that I’m making. You can see the metal that bubbled and dripped before cooling. I added cool colored glass to counter the heat implied by the metal and to add some sharp edges to the smooth melted steel.

1″x 2″, glass

If you read my post last week, you know that I was thinking about all the small gaps in knowledge that young kids have, and how those fill, or don’t fill, over time.  This week I’ve been spending a lot of time with my grandmother, who is struggling with severe dementia. I made this pendant bigger, to represent the vast knowledge that she’s acquired over 97 years, but I’ve left even bigger spaces between the pieces of glass.  The holes in her understanding are growing every day. Not sure where she sleeps, not sure who I am, she’s losing the big picture bit by bit.  As I put this together I struggled to leave the spaces.  In fact, after I took a photo of it I couldn’t help myself; I squeezed in more pieces to fill the empty spaces.  I wish it were that easy to re-fill the spaces in her understanding, but answers to her questions just fall away leave holes as big as they were before.