On August 1st my husband and I moved to a new dwelling, which means I’ve got tons of new space to create in! My new banner shows you a sneak peak into my dedicated studio area. Now that I’ve got a room of my own, I hope to rock out some new pieces in the near future (I know it has been forever! But dissertations consume all mental space if you let them! And, well, 2010 has been the year to seal up that goal). Good news on that front though, I’m finding lots of inspiration for my craft in the documents I’m scouring through. So that’s promising! Can’t wait to show you what I’ve got up my mental sleeves!
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My how time flies. In late February, I tried my hand at a brand new craft: making glass beads. I'd never touched molten glass before, so this was a totally new arena for me. I felt humbled by the newness of the material to my hands.
I broke so many beads the first day, I was sure this was not going to be the art form for me. I wanted to MAKE beads, not BREAK beads! But the second day, I kept making, and making. The more I tried out various colors and techniques (dots versus stripes for example) the more excited I got. The beads stopped exploding in my face, and finally, some really neat things started to happen. I wish the workshop had been longer than two days because I had so many visions for other types of techniques I wanted to try. Here are the results of my workshop with a kicker thrown in at the end:
I'm not sure what I'll do with these beads yet. They are sitting right here, catching the light, letting me covet them. The biggest perk of the workshop wasn't these end products, though. Encountering the brick wall of my limitations was such a thrill. And I feel like I'm only at the beginning of what's possible! (And Tara Murray, by the way, is one of the best instructors I've ever had. She's got a talent for encouraging people to step into that space of creative fear and push forward. If you can work with her, go for it!)
PS and yes, you can learn how to make a bee like that in two days flat. I promise you! ;)
I'm digging the spring weather in Berkeley, and I love a good sale, so this morning I decided to pass along the cheer and have an impromptu spring fling sale on the jewelry in my shop! Check it out: http://www.etsy.com/shop/artbyzahrt
Seven years ago, with the fall quickly becoming winter in manhattan, I went to a place called Dikra in midtown and purchased a few cabochons for my jewelry class. I used two out of the three, and while having great plans to set the third stone, time flew, the semester was up, and I never finished that piece.
This weekend I finally set this turquoise-blue amazonite stone:
Throughout the process my mind was flooded with memories of where that stone had been that year, of the plans I had to set it (numerous and I never settled quite fully on one), the people I knew then, the places I went with them, and in the end of all that, I abandoned the stone…it stayed with me in the recesses of my house, piled with the other neglected art projects that I am now excavating and expanding on.
I never expected working again on this stone to create such an intense sense of time travel. It really could have been 2002 in that room when I burnished the stone in place (Burnishing by the way has become one of my favorite processes in jewelry-making. It takes a lot of muscle and focus to get a sweet, smooth line around the stone. In class my nickname became "the Burnisher" set to the tune of the end of Big Punisher's "Still Not a Player" around min. 3:12 …burnishaaaa)
I can’t recount all that went into this piece, but I will say that I didn’t go into the workshop with this form in mind. To see it now after having gone through the process of creating it is surprising even to me. I’m definitely loving the adventure. (The stone is glass, by the way, and it is even more intense in person. And no, that psychedelic patina color won’t last forever. The patina will eventually go darker black, but hey, I can dig rainbows as long as they last!)
