Monthly Archives: May 2023

1″x 1.5″, found objects

Yesterday was absolutely beautiful…until 6:00. Then all of a sudden the skies darkened and it rained on and off for the rest of the evening.  Wet grass, black clouds and an end to the happy blue skies meant I shivered in my spring coat. Now I’m watching the weather apps anxiously to see what the skies have in store for us in a week, when we’ll be celebrating my daughter. So this pendant, or “drop”, as my grandmother would have called it, aims to find the beauty in rain and puddles. Maybe a little rain on our celebration won’t be so bad.

.5″ x 2″, found objects

This week my colleagues have been talking a lot about mental health as they’ve been deciding what to focus their work on for the next 6 years.  And this week turned me into the parent of a teenager.  So between the two, protective factors and how to build them has been on my mind. How do we best foster resilience? How do we create caring relationships between young people and the adults around them?  How do we provide both skills and opportunities to youth as they grow? It’s a big topic, but this tiny pendant explores many types of protective factors: wrapping and blocking, learning to step forward, and connections.

1.5″ x .5″, found objects

I spent some of today at an enormous antique flea market, looking for pieces for a project, and what everyone paid top dollar for were the old, battered, weathered objects that still hold together.  If it’s too perfect it’s probably new, and that crowd of pickers definitely didn’t want anything new.  As I made this pendant I tried to re-shape the bent sides of the metal piece on the bottom, and I tried to open the silver ring evenly, but neither one happened the way I’d hoped.  Fortunately, the two irregularities balance each other, and you can definitely tell the pieces I made it from aren’t new!

2″ x 1″, found objects

It’s not that sweets are always on my mind (only most of the time), but this week I’ve been doing a carefully restricted diet suggested by a nutritionist, and all the wonderful parts of donuts are off the table.  No sugar, no gluten, no dairy, no chocolate… there’s not much left except kale and bananas. And so I’m moving through the world seeing everything as donuts.  When I chose each piece for this pendant I first saw them as wooden beads, metal rings, or glass, but as soon as they were together and I stepped back, it was clear that this was a meditation on donuts.  The rings, the donut holes, the colors. There’s really no question.