3mar2010

Hi there, sorry for the hiatus. I have a cast-iron excuse, or at least machined-titanium one, though: I got hit by a car! Yes, I am now the proud owner in the very latest in titanium body jewelry, to wit, a collarbone plate, a pin, and six screws. And, yes, if you wondered, bone screws come in both coarse and fine threaded versions. (This was actually a question I intended to ask the orthopedist who put the plate in, except his assistant showed me my latest batch of x-rays and I was able to plainly deduce this on my own, from the pictures. I must say, x-rays of bone do produce a beautiful texture.)

However, my little automotive impact has had, shall we say, a negative impact on my productivity. I did put some things on sale (as in, discounted—so buy now—ok, spiel over:) on etsy (they're the featured items) and hope to be back to posting soon. In the meantime, we've done (which is to say, the wizard did a ton of work, and I whined about things I didn't like) on the site, and it has now has search and tagging features. Type in text to find posts that include that particular string; click on tags to get a list, then, click on a tag (on the tags page) to get all the posts that have been so tagged. (Admittedly I need to go thru and tag a bunch of stuff...)

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15feb2010

Trusting you had a nice Valentine's Day. I made a hopelessly sappy virtual card for the wizard, but at least I got some gimp practice in, and did experiment with some brushes I'd never used before. I'm really liking the ability to shift from one color to another as you paint (or draw) depending upon pressure. (You can set gimp to shift using other parameters as well, though of course a tablet makes this sort of messing about much easier.)

The wizard's valentine, so to speak, has been the continuing upgrades to this website: today I get to use the new editing tool:) —In fact, today's post started out basically as a way to test said tool, so it's not real exciting, just some twisted dot beads I made awhile back. Otoh, I guess the site is going live today:)

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13feb2010

Hi there! Sorry for the hiatus—the wizard has been busting his buns revamping the site, which means I've spent a lot of time testing (i.e. finding bugs) rather than making new content. Phase I will include the ability to search, either with your own terms or pre-defined tags (e.g. "glassbeads") which hopefully will make finding that obscure post on pysanky or meta-strawberries easier:)

With luck the new site will go live sometime later this week, and I'll tell you more about it then. (It'll still look much the same, since it's functionality we're adding.) This is something that's been on our to-do list for years, so it's pretty exciting to see it finally happening. (Also a little scary. There are something like 15 thousand files associated with this website, and granted a lot of them are boring back-end stuff associated with generating the content, but still...that's a lot;)

I also took a class last Monday and Tuesday, an offhand sculptural lampworking class with Gianni Toso. He was in town to do a demo at the Toledo Museum of art, and my goodness, taking the class was almost worth it just to get me off my butt to check out their splendid new Glass Pavilion. Wow. Definitely worth a look, and they had a glass bead sculpture! Sort of like a cross of some of my more free-form stringing and more regular wall hangings (as opposed to the bead curtain, and which I have yet to put up on the site, sorry—they're a real pest to photograph). Always happy to see stringing celebrated, and as they're busy making their own bead curtain, I should send ’em some beads;)

Anyway. In the process of trying to make fairy heads with shamrocks, I made some test beads that I thought would make pretty, simple necklaces, kind of like my fave glass bead necklace—so here they are, a mint shamrock necklace etsy/artfire and a dark green version (etsy/artfire). I think they're really cute—the sort of lightweight, easy thing you throw on and go (plus I finally got a chance to use my fancy ohause scale I got from page—though I was pretty impressed that my $5 plastic kitchen scale from the local department store was within a couple of grams—yay for improving technology.)

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29jan2010

Technically, this is yesterday's post.

I made another fairy, a green one (etsy) (artfire) this time. She's a bit bigger than my other ones, and I'm pretty happy with her, even if photographing her did give me fits. I also managed to make the bead without cracking it once, or breaking off the release, go me. (One of the great things about glass is that if it cracks while it's still in the flame, you can melt that back together. Actually I know people who stick their cracked beads in the kiln, ramp ’em up, and fix ’em by re-introducing them into the flame, which I perfectly understand if you've sunk 2 hours into a bead, but I'm not quite that determined.)

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27jan2010

So, sorry about the lack of posting yesterday, I just was sort of out of it. To make up, I have two new goodies for etsy/artfire.

So we're gonna move forward in time a bit, to things I'm doing right now, as opposed to twenty years ago, since I've finally got to the point of having something marginally interesting to show in my current work, which would be these acid etched fairies in blue (artfire) and er orange, I mean pink (artfire).

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25jan2010

Trusting you had a nice weekend; it rose above freezing, and rained, which meant I was over-warm, a bit. (Yeah, I've been perfectly happy with temps in the high twenties and low thirties. Not too cold, and avoids the freeze-thaw cycles that are so hard on my plants, especially my hydrangeas;)

So, I promised more blathering about Avatar, specifically about the beadwork. As I said last time, the red beaded cape the love interest's mother wears is taken right off the back cover of the classic book about African beadwork, and is Dinka beadwork. Similarly the corsets the male Na'vi wear on their torsos—you'll note, Jake gets one towards the end of the movie: it's that wide brown belt thingie with the cream colored swirlies that he wears around his middle—is also Dinka in its shape; however, those do not appear to be beaded (as in the originals), but rather fabric of some sort. And they all looked like they had the same design. (But then, I thought all the Na'vi were the same shade of blue, and second time around I spotted at least one that was darker.) The same basic concept is also used by the Dinka to make handsome collars, and these also make an appearance in the film. The red-painted folk in the neighboring tribe could have been inspired by any of several depicted in the same book.

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