What’s New

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.

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.