health pendants

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.

1″ diameter, found objects

A generous friend who knows I like little things stopped by this week with two boxes of black gears. Beautifully milled and with good weight they look nice, but apparently their tolerances were a bit off and they failed some QA tests.  The gears got me thinking about tolerances. Just how much can things be wrong and still function?  How do we decide when things have gotten bad enough to say enough is enough? One more school shooting added to a long list of others and still, all we do is sigh.  I think we have to adjust our tolerances. 

1″x1.5″, glass

I’ve been doing some glass fusing with two classes at the High School.  One of the key concepts in fusing is compatibility.  All of the glass that’s fused into one piece has to have the same coefficient of expansion (COE) so that it doesn’t crack apart as it cools.  Glass that’s compatible expands and contracts at the same rate, heating and cooling in synch.  I was thinking today about compatibility of people, and how it’s almost the same.  Friendships work best when everyone likes the same balance of activity and down time, the same amount of dancing and napping.  Of course, people can see past incompatibility and make friendships work anyway, but glass isn’t as forgiving. This pendant is made of stringers of compatible glass (all 90 COE for anyone who’s interested).

1″ x 2″, glass and found objects

I spent hours as child looking at the oil slicks floating on top of puddles by the side of the road.  I loved the swirls and rainbows of colors, and the way they changed as I moved my head. Some things that I’ve learned about over the years have taken away the magic of what I see, but others just enhance it.  When I learned about iridescence and how it gives rainbow boas’ skin the same rainbow look just made it seem even more magical.  So now, when I find glass, which I love, that looks iridescent, which I love, it’s pretty slick.

1″ x 2.25″, gifted objects

This weekend at Open Studios I put my jewelry on display at the Armory building. Selling handmade work is strangely vulnerable, waiting for strangers to decide whether they like your style and your technique enough to own your work and pay you for what you’ve made.  Whenever the crowds would thin, the artists showing their work would try to see each others’ booths. Other artists look with a special eye, not for what we want to own, but for how the pieces are made and how the other person sees the world. At one point Sharon from Salamander Arts stopped by and handed me a treasure trove of materials. Tiny beads and strange metal bits, just the kind thing I love! She said she thought I could use them and she’s right! This week’s pendant was so much more fun to make because the pieces were a gift from her and not just “found” like so many of the bits that I usually use.

1″ x 3/4″, found objects

It’s springtime and we’ve pulled out the tools for the garden.  For the most part they get used and then stuck in the dirt until the next time we need them, which means that every day as I walk to the door I pass a spade sticking out of the soil. That gives many reasons to think about all the spade-related expressions that I don’t fully understand.  My mom used to say “better call a spade a spade”.  I know there’s a card reference, but what’s the connection?  And why would something you have a lot of be something you have “in spades”? I know I could just google the answers, but instead I’ll wonder for a while longer, passing the spade in the garden each day.

1″x 2″, found objects

I’ve always loved library shelves.  Books with different heights and colors, textures and fonts, all lined up, spines pointed out, lined up and put in order. Ruffles and pleats, stacks of plates and folded sweaters all have the same comforting sense of multiplicity. Lots of the same thing, organized, but not entirely alike.  In this pendant the multiplicity comes from shiny and dull black circles, some empty and some full.  Iridescent beads that are so alike they’re clearly a set, but with their own quirky color variations and accidental angles.

1″ diameter, wood

It’s not just the tiny size, cool shapes and neat textures that I love about scraps, but also the fact that they’ve been tossed aside.  If I can find a use for them it feels like I should get extra points, not just points for good environmental stewardship, but points for creativity. On a recent visit to our local fab lab someone was cutting detailed Moroccan-inspired patterns out of wood veneer, and the punched-out scraps were about to be tossed. I asked permission and shoved some of them into my pocket, waiting for a moment of inspiration.  Here they are!

1″x 2″, glass, stone and found objects

In the ongoing days of COVID I’m thinking all the time about how to shield myself and my family from the virus, whether it’s with masks, isolation or elderberry syrup.  But it’s not just the virus that I shield myself from. I find that my clothes are a shield, against the cold, against being judged as unprofessional or judged as too serious.  I like the crossover between shields and family crests too, where a shield can protect us and simultaneously broadcast our identities and our affiliations.  This pendants uses some of may favorite colors and materials to form a traditional shield shape. Maybe it’ll also ward off the COVID virus?

1.5″ diameter, found objects

Many years ago I learned to make hollow glass beads.  When they’re made with opaque glass they trick the eye, looking heavy but feeling light.  I learned this week about aerogels, which are a most extreme version of being mostly hollow and super light.  The holes in aerogels blur the boundaries of the substance, and the holes through this pumice dull the light bouncing off it, in stark contrast to the shiny metal surrounding it. I like the idea that things aren’t always what they seem. What seems seems heavy might be light. and what seems simple might delight.