All in the Family

All of our kids (6 of them between The Gruffalo and myself) are artists.

A word about that number: I did not give birth six times. From prior marriages we each have 3, making a total of 6 in our blended family. When The Gruffalo and I got serious about our relationship, I watched how our children handled the Brady Bunching initiated by their parents. One thing that I noticed right away was a nearly universal lack of using 'step' when introducing or talking about their new siblings. Following their lead, I refer to all six of these terrific people as 'the kids' without a modifier (except in situations where there is the possibility of creating confusion).

Two of our daughters, Kage and The Mogul, also make jewelry. All of the kids have some (or lots) of their stuff stored at our house, and The Mogul came over last week to sort through some of her boxes of belongings.

Besides getting some free space in the garage, I had a bit of a bead swap with The Mogul. She browsed through my stash for things that she needed and, in turn, gave me some beads that I normally would not have chosen on my own.

This necklace is made up of some of the beads that The Mogul gave me, along with some copper barrel-shaped beads that I was trying to figure out how to use. All of the beads are knotted on beige colored silk cord, except for the large central bead which is wire wrapped on a decorative head pin:

And a close up of the focal piece of the necklace, which is really pretty and unusual:

I am working on another necklace using The Mogul's beads, and I'll post photos when it is done. All of the beads that she gave me are heavy marble or quartz or glass...not quite sure what I'm working with here but I appreciate the chance to use something besides aquamarine seed beads (my default color and size mode).

And I appreciate the extra space in the garage.

The Most Important Meal of the Day

I am writing this in the aftermath of a migraine.

It was my own silly fault. One of my triggers is low blood sugar, and I did not eat today until lunchtime. No good reason for that, I just got caught up in doing things and did not take in any calories until mid-day.

By the time I had food in front of me, I felt the first warnings of an attack brewing deep inside. Those unique sensations are not pain, they are more like an electric irritation in the blood. Once I felt those odd, unmistakable twitches I gave myself an injection of a medication that can stave off an attack. And I ate lunch.

The medication did not work with that first dose. Within an hour of lunch I had a full blown migraine.

It is not just a headache, although the pain and pressure inside the skull are so intense that I always feel it must leave scars. A migraine is a profound scrambling of all sensations. In the tiny, beset part of my brain that is not devoted to riding out the attack I imagine that every bit of my skin is coated with a thick, yellow-grey slime that poisons and distorts every bit of input that comes my way.

Light slices. Sound is too heavy. A sip of water burns. Touch is too loud. Only a very narrow range of temperature is bearable, and the parameters of that range fluctuate constantly. Any instructions sent from my brain are spitefully ignored by my muscles and nerves making my hands and arms and legs useless. Rolling over in bed becomes a prolonged negotiation between my head and the rest of my body.

A second injection did stop the attack today. When it works, the medication intensifies the pain for about five minutes and then *poof*. Migraine gone. The medication is not an opiate so there is no grogginess or hangover after the attack goes away, and I am grateful for that. Meds that were available earlier in my life were at least as debilitating as the migraine attack. Thanks to the medication I will lose a few hours to an attack instead of an entire day or two.

So this attack has cut into my long weekend for a little bit, but it could have been worse. It has been worse. There is a genetic component to this condition--my mother's father had it, my Mom has it, at least two of my kids have had attacks. But, again, the migraine today was completely preventable. A granola bar in the morning would have made all the difference.

Cup Chain Bracelet

My Mom has a great talent: she can recreate anything in the kitchen after tasting it once. I wrote about her ability to deconstruct & reconstruct recipes in a prior post.

I do not share this culinary talent, however I have a similar ability with jewelry. I will see something beautiful at the accessory counter at Nordstrom and can (usually) figure out how to recreate it at home. Even when shiny things are on deep discount, I think to myself I can make that for sooooo much less...

Case in point: I have seen variations of cup chain bracelets all over the place. Here are some that I made in my studio after studying the ones at Bloomingdale's:

I made six of these in various color combinations and wore several at once on our recent vacation. With the button closures staggered it creates an interesting look--stacked bracelets are so hot right now.

The purpose of this post is two-fold; to show you new finished work and to blow my own horn. In late July I will be teaching a workshop in which I teach this technique at Artside Studio in Fullerton. Carol & Steffi of Artside have created a wonderful gallery, studio and workshop space and I'm sure they would appreciate it if you like them on Facebook. I am terribly excited about the opportunity to teach at Artside, and I am grateful to Steffi for taking this gorgeous photo of my work.

If you are in the Orange County area and would like to take this class, you can get more information on the Artside website page for the workshop.

Art is fun!

Gatsby-esque

The Gruffalo and I are at the age when the adult children of friends are starting to get married. We recently attended a lovely wedding in Portland, Oregon for our friends' daughter.

The dress that I wore to the ceremony and the reception was short and somewhat flapperish. I spent some time before we traveled out of state to make jewelry to go with the dress.

Here are the two necklaces and earrings that I made:

The 'pearls' are actually glass. They are knotted on a length of cord. On the jewelry form for this photograph I doubled the pearl strand. For the party, I wore it full length. The choker is a separate piece. I also made a bracelet that looks like the choker, but without the dangles.

Here is a closer shot:

The round elements are actually beaded beads. They are made up of several bead sizes & shapes stitched together to form an element that dimensional and identical on both sides. The components that make up the beaded beads are two-hole (twin) beads, 4 mm crystal bicones and seed beads.

I enjoy the whole roaring twenties, Great Gatsby-like look. It is fun to take elements of a period style and incorporate them into modern-day clothing. I would never dress head to toe in flapper style (unless I was going to a costume party), but this jewelry, worn with a short, drop-waist dress, made me feel very elegant.

Despite my love of the art and style of this period, I have not (and will not) see the new film adaptation of Gatsby. Sometimes a favorite novel should be left in the realm of literature. (Major exception: the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.) And I do love Fitzgerald's best-known novel in spite of the controversy over his writing methods.

Oh, and congratulations to the newly-weds. We had a lovely time and were so happy to share your big day with you. This wedding, I must say, was the first time that I have seen bridesmaid dresses that would actually work in a non-wedding setting.

Resin-ate

When I stopped working at my day job, I was certain that I would be able to write a new blog post at least once a week. As it turns out, I have been having way too much fun doing not much of anything to keep up with that sort of schedule.

But doing nothing gets old fast for me, so I started re-arranging one of the bedrooms (the one we call The Girls' Room) into a studio. I have a way to go yet, because there are remnants from previous occupants (The Girls) that need to be stored, but I do have a good work space carved out. The last couple of weeks have been filled with jewelry making and offline writing. Time to share some of the former...

Last year I took a class from guest instructor Lisa Pavelka at my local bead shop. Lisa is an amazing artist who works in many different media--the class that I took was all about using resin to make jewelry. Lisa has developed a one-step resin that cures in a few minutes under UV light. It is a wonderful product. It spreads out evenly over flat surfaces and domes naturally as it spreads. It has high surface tension so, unless you flood the surface with resin, it will not overflow the edge of the underlying substrate. Lisa showed us how to layer thin coats of resin, curing under UV light between each coat, to create dimensional pieces.

Because Lisa and her team are entirely awesome, they provided Magic Glos (TM) along with round acrylic blanks, tiny metal components, little flowers, glitter, rub-on foil, clear transfers and other items to make our pieces. Under her guidance, this is the very first resin piece that I ever made:

This piece contains several layers of resin on top of a round acrylic blank. There are small metal pieces (a key, a flower shape and clock cogs) as well as glitter, a dried flower and black transfers incorporated into the resin. The two silver wheels on the sides are partially embedded in resin to provide a way to attach a chain or other necklace. I am not sure what sort of jewelry piece I will make using this. Perhaps I will keep it as is to remind me of how I started out with this medium. Using resin is a fun process and, because each layer cures in 3 - 5 minutes, you can create a finished piece very quickly.

(Note: As further evidence of Lisa's awesomeness, all of the students received a package from her a week or so after the class. This package contained even more items from Lisa's line to encourage us to experiment with our newly acquired resin-working skills. I sent a thank you note at the time but wanted to give a public shout-out to Ms Pavelka for her ability to merge artistic talent with graceful, generous customer service.)

Bead weaving with a single needle is still my first love when it comes to jewelry making, but I enjoy having lots of other techniques at my disposal. Resin has been my medium of choice for the past couple of weeks.

My birthstone is ruby, so I decided to make myself a ruby necklace & earrings. I started with three pieces of silver filigree from my hoard. I mixed up a tiny bit of resin with red & silver glitter. This was the first layer on my homemade gems. After curing the glitter layer, I added a few layers of resin to create domed jewels. Once everything was cured I glued red crystals onto the necklace filigree and added the findings to make this necklace:

 

Here is a side view which shows how the beautifully this resin domes across the top:

 



This doming acts as a lens so that items added in previous layers are magnified. It is really cool to watch a piece develop.

These are the earrings that go with the necklace:

This is a ring that I made out of clear and red crystals. No resin in this piece. The crystals are on wire-wrapped head pins and attached to a ring form with jump rings:

There is a lot of movement to the ring, which I like. It is also free-form as opposed to the necklace & earrings, which are more structured. When I design pieces to go together, I like to have some aspects that are not completely matchy-matchy across all of the pieces.

When this process stops resin-ating (sorry!) with me, I will move on to another technique. For the foreseeable future, though, I'm having a blast dropping little tiny shiny things into Magic Glos (TM).

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

It is the morning of Mother’s Day 2013. We have a dozen people coming over for brunch, and that tomato and cucumber salad is not going to chop itself, but I have to write this post.

The Gruffalo and I have six adult children between us, yet no grandchildren. This is a fact that I bring up now and then to Kage, BeanBeanMoreBean, Smallest of All, The Mogul, Gandhi and Matisyahu, especially after I have spent time around a baby or a toddler. I am terribly subtle about it—a quick text to all six that reads only “GRANDCHILDREN!!!” is an example of my restraint in this area.

Despite my gentle teasing, though, I do not want anyone (my kids or anyone else’s kids) to have children before they are completely ready to do so. Parenthood is unrelenting hard work, and it never, ever ends. Even when you are totally prepared, you are never, ever ready. To paraphrase Debra Winger’s character in 'Terms of Endearment': As hard as you think it’s going to be, you end up wishing it was that easy.

With that in mind, I have to salute the Moms in my life before I start preparing brunch.

First of all, here’s to women who become mothers without raising a child. Both of my sisters, Barf and KK, have become mothers to adult children (and, thence, grandmothers--grrrrr!) through two completely different sets of circumstances, and they have done so with admirable grace and total commitment. Spending time with an infant is delicious, and women who step into motherhood do not get to begin their demanding role with this joyful interval. And, as I mentioned above, parenthood never, ever ends. Just because a child has become an adult does not mean that the challenges of mothering that person come to an end. With adulthood there are new and unthinkably complex issues for grown children and their parents to navigate. I raise a mimosa to women who willingly step into mothering adult children who they had no part in raising.

And here’s to my Mom. She is, as anyone in the family will tell you, magical. When my father was intermittently unemployed during my childhood, she somehow managed always to have money set aside for the necessities and the silly little luxuries that are vital to teenagers, like the perfect shade of light blue nail polish to match a home-made middle-school graduation dress. Even more importantly, she always had the time to make the dress and the time to drive around to find said blue nail polish. (Note to anyone younger than 40: in the 1970’s, you could have any color of polish you wanted as long as it was red or pink.)

Besides her money- and time-management skills, Mom has an uncanny ear for languages. When my sisters and I learned Spanish, Mom was always able to completely understand what we were saying. She could only answer in English, but our plans to speak Spanish in order to keep secrets from her were for naught. The same phenomenon occurred when my sisters and I resorted to Double-Dutch, a made up language that thwarted all of our middle school teachers but was no match for Mom.

In the kitchen, Mom is a wizard. If she tastes a dish she is able to deconstruct it and re-create it with eerie precision. She reads cook books like I read novels and she is always coming up with something new, while retaining all of the old favorites in her repertoire. She is also able to improvise brilliantly. Two words: Cheesy potatoes. Or, going back several years, a treat that prompted a neighbor to call one Saturday morning to ask “How do you make that #@$%& melted cheese on toast?”

My sisters and I were the recipients of all of this love, attention and cheese, as were all of our friends. Mom must have fed a regiment of kids when we were growing up, again doing so on an impossibly tight budget. She baked non-stop for weeks prior to Christmas and Easter, then distributed boxes of cookies to neighbors and friends and the priests at our parish. One of her springtime specialties, butterfly cookies, always caused a small, decidedly un-Christian scuffle in the rectory when she dropped them off.

And, although this is an incredibly long and complicated story that I will save for another blog post, Mom is also one of those women who stepped into parenting an adult child. The adult child is her own first-born. This puts her in yet another category, women who give birth to a baby knowing that the child will be raised by another woman. These are certainly mothers who deserve recognition today, too; women who make motherhood possible for someone else.

This entry has gone on longer than I planned and the brunch prep must begin now, but not before I raise a Pimm’s cup to Mom, a terrific mother and one of the bravest women I know.

Feliz Dia de las Madres, Mamacita, Itheguy lutheguve yahthegoo!

Lunchtime wrap

I ended my employment about a month ago, but I can't really say that I'm retired. More like redirected. The Gruffalo and I have plenty to keep us busy. The main difference now is that, once the laundry and dishes and shopping and cooking and general straightening up and pet tasks are all done, I have time for things that seemed like a luxury before, like writing and beading.

This post is a follow up to a previous post. I wrote 'It's a Wrap' about disassembling a bracelet for my yoga teacher Tiny Dancer and remaking it into something that she could wear.

Tiny Dancer and I met for lunch a couple of weeks ago. It was a lovely day and we sat outside for two reasons: to enjoy the spring weather and to accommodate Tiny Dancer's dog, a soft-coated wheaten terrier who was recovering from a procedure at the vet. The pup was too pathetic to leave alone at home so Tiny Dancer brought her along to lunch. She wondered whether I minded this. Note to anyone who might be meeting me for lunch: bringing pets and/or babies is never a problem for me. In fact, I will mind it very much if the opportunity exists and you do not bring pets and/or babies to lunch with you.

In addition to the turquoise and silver bead wrap bracelet that I made from taking apart her old bracelet, Tiny Dancer asked me to make a new wrap bracelet from silver beads on black leather cord. When we met for lunch both pieces were left unfinished so that I could wrap them on her wrist and make sure that the length was just right. After she tried on both bracelets I finished them up by clipping off the fuzzies and knotting the leather cord at the end to make a loop closure.

Here is the re imagined bracelet made from Tiny Dancer's old, clunky, too-big bracelet:

 

 

So considerate of her to wear turquoise to match the jewelry!

 

And this is the black and silver wrap bracelet that Tiny Dancer commissioned:

 

 

Please note the doggie's noggin in the upper left of this shot.

 

This bracelet uses small textured silvertone beads and slightly larger filigree-look silvertone beads stitched to black leather cord. The closure (which is not visible in this shot) is a rectangular silvertone button with a swirly pattern.

 

It is always satisfying to create something new, even more so when you have the pleasure of knowing that the person you made it for is really happy with it. Practicing yoga with Tiny Dancer has given me a great deal of enjoyment and it's nice to return the favor.

 

Time for a few Sun Salutations, slightly modified due to one or more cats leaping onto my back when I'm doing cobra position...