Pangaea

What's in a name?

Do you name your work? I always name my pieces. Even if it is something as small as a ring I feel compelled to name my work. To me this is a reflection of the care I've put in to creating the piece. But its not always easy. On the rare (joyful) occasion I'll already have a name in mind before I even pull out the first beads. Sometimes I'll finish a piece and still not know who or what it is. Typically this happens with smaller pieces and I'll leave them sitting on a bust in my studio until a name comes to me or until I want to list the item in my Etsy shop. When things get desperate I'll look at the piece and try to assess what kind of mood or vibe it is projecting and then pick a girl's name that reflects that. So an angular, masculine looking piece might get a unisex sounding name like Terry and a floral inspired ring with a violet Charoite cabochon becomes Viola.

Usually though, the name will come to me whilst I'm working on a piece even if I'm not sure at the start what its going to be. Like with Pangaea. All I knew was that I was making a collar using a technique I'd already tried several times before combining lots of rivolis with a beadwoven leaf shape I'd developed. This time I wanted to incorporate some focal cabochons amongst the rivolis.

I played around with a couple of options and the grey and copper really spoke to me. I realised that the three focal stones I'd chosen were all fossils - a beautiful fossilised palmwood cabochon from Gary Wilson and two Orthoceras fossil cabs from Cabochons Galore. I liked that! There was a theme developing...I added some oval Crinoid fossil beads I'd had for years that worked in perfectly. Then I got really excited because I remembered I still had some adorable little copper toned metal leaf shaped findings - an assortment of fossils and leaves!

Here is a collage of my progress. By the time I got to the last shot I still had no idea what I was going to call it.

Then the universe provided...leafing through an interior design magazine I saw an article about a flooring company that was called Pangaea. The name was really familiar but I couldn't remember why, so I googled (as you do) and discovered that Pangaea was the last supercontinent that formed around 299 million years ago. It incorporated nearly all the landmasses on earth that became today's continents. Immediately I thought of the piece I was working on, of the fossilised flora and fauna in my cabochons - orthoceras are prehistoric squid, crinoid are ancient see lilies...fossilised palmwood... What sort of plant life would have inhabited Pangaea? Even the rivolis nestled tight one against the other made me think of the continents all pressed in together to form this supercontinent - a 'supercollar'! And there was the name of my piece, handed to me by a company that made concrete floors. 

 Originally I was going to call it The Fauna and Flora of Pangaea but decided that that sounded a bit pompous so it became just Pangaea.

And you? How do you name your creations?

A Tale of Two Colours - part two

Blue Green

Like I said, I like all colours equally but a quick look in my bead drawers will reveal the truth...more than any other colour, I am drawn to blue-green. My largest collection of seed beads is in the shades of turquoise, teal, aqua and seafoam. Amazonite, turquoise and chrysocolla are the gemstones I seem to collect compulsively. There's something about that combination of calming and tranquil light blue, the balance and sense of growth you get from green with a touch of the uplifting energy of yellow that I find irresistible.

A lot of my work is quite monochrome and I've found that incorporating a metallic colour adds visual interest and imbues the work with a sense of luxury. I can't remember the last time I made anything that didn't incorporate at least one metallic! The fact that bluish greens are a mix of warm (yellow) and cool (blue) means that they pair well with any kind of metallic. Here's a collage of some of the ways I've used them in combination with gold, bronze, silver and even hematite.

Atlantis Series

Some of my most recent blue-green pieces form a mini collection using turquoise gemstones and copper seed beads. They were inspired by a series of findings I discovered on Etsy called 'Mykonos beads' - ceramic beads in all shapes and sizes coated in a metallic paint that's been treated with an ageing finish. They have the most wonderful patina of weathered copper and instantly made me think of sunken treasure brought up from the deep and the name ATLANTIS. The bluish bloom over metallic copper was the bridge that made me think of combining turquoise with copper (something I'd never considered before) and thinking about sunken treasure lead me to consider the way rope is patinated with weed and algae when it is submerged underwater and the way everything submerged becomes encrusted with barnacles.

The contents of my purchase consisted of two filigreed round drops, four wavy spikes, five small hexagonal drops and a small handful of irregular shaped spacer beads which I used down to the very last spacer to create a pendant suspended from a spiral rope to represent the covering of weeds that collect on a ships rope, a convertible pendant/brooch with a fringe of spiral rope glistening with tiny 2mm Swarovski Crystal AB droplets like a dock rope pulled wet from the sea, a cuff redolent with the encrustations of something long submerged and a collar using turquoise cabochons for the blue of the Mediterranean Sea and turritella cabochons and faceted Czech firepolish representative of the barnacles encrusting my sunken treasure.

I'm especially pleased with the way the collar turned out...the combination of copper and bronze seed beads, the small pops of bright turquoise jumping out from the shadows of the dark turritella cabochons reminds me of deep shadows created by bright sunlight like you would find in a Mediterranean summer port and the way I've used sections of bead weaving to create a visually lighter piece. All these things came to me because I had the name Atlantis ringing in my head and that informed all my decisions after I had the initial layout. I always find it interesting how a project develops and what is dropped and added...can you see the changes?

Creating a mini collection was a good way of scratching my blue-green itch and after it was finished I was very happy to move on to other colours...at least for a while as I haven't totally depleted my stock of turquoise cabochons. Oh that's right! one must stopping buying more of something before it can be depleted!

Is it only me or do you too have a colour bias that makes you helpless in resisting a purchase of seed beads or stones in that particular colour?

A Tale of Two Colours

Brown

Have you ever been asked 'What's your favourite colour?' As an interior designer I was asked that quite often, to which I would tactfully reply 'I love them all!'

Which was not strictly speaking true...I was harbouring a secret...a deep, dark colour loathing secret... As far as a colour that one wore on their person be it clothing, jewellery, footwear or handbag I loved all colours - but one...brown.

 Ask someone what their favourite colour is and no one will tell you its brown. In the early naughties when brown was the interior design colour de jour, we'd call it chocolate, coffee, umber, wood tone, tawny, hazel anything except for what it really was - brown. Lets face it - brown is boring, dependable, stodgy. As Winston Churchill (who can always be relied on for a good quote, even when it isn't his) said "I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns".

You can't really blame me though. In Australia, everyone wears a school uniform and my brown ban began in high school when I was burdened with the twin indignities of a brown, box pleat tunic. The school colours were brown and yellow - a truly heinous colour combination and if that wasn't bad enough compound that with a 'box pleat' which, as the name implies, made even the willowy-est of girls look like brown boxes. The other kids, safe in their ivory towers of navy and burgundy uniform superiority called us 'The Turds'. The humiliation! There wasn't enough therapy in the world to cure me of my loathing for brown.

Then I discovered seed beads and I loved all colours even more, and I made lots of beautiful wearable things in all the colours of the rainbow (even pink, a colour which I also never wear) except, of course, brown. Until I discovered Miyuki colour 458 - otherwise known as Metallic Brown Iris. This colour is better than therapy! This is a brown I can love. Firstly its metallic so it has to be good, it also has glorious iris flashes of violet and electric blue and its great if you need a really dark 'shadow' colour that won't deaden other colours around it like black can. I've used it in lots of pieces that I wouldn't call brown...

For example, in the pendant and chain (left) titled Incandescent, I wanted the entire piece to have an antique gold appearance which is quite bright in terms of its tone. I added just a scattering of the low key, dark 458 beads to contrast with the golds and create visual interest whilst still keeping it 'gold'.

For my 2014 Bead Dreams entry (right) called Through a Glass, Darkly I wanted the whole piece to be black but was worried all black beads would make it look flat and boring. Adding the 458 beads gave it a nice overall bronze sheen 

without changing the colour.

My new found appreciation for colour 458 made me open to the beauty found in other brown coloured things that I could use in my bead work, like smokey quartz and simbircite so I decided to go all the way and make a 'brown' piece. To ensure my monochrome piece didn't wind up too 'how now brown cow' I thought I'd try to incorporate a variety of textures with the use of the smokey quartz chips for their chunky, nugget like appearance and a random placement of beads inside the outline of leaves which created an almost dotted effect which I quite liked, throwing in some pops of colour with Swarovski's Scarabaeus Green and highlights of pyrite coloured seed beads. Here's the result:

I called it Skye because half way through making it I went travelling in the UK and when I came back the colours really reminded me of the colours of the landscape on the Isle of Skye. I like it. I think I can now truly say: I love ALL colours!

Unintended Consequences

Unintended Consequences is a term used in the social sciences and popularised by sociologist Robert K Merton in the twentieth century to describe 'outcomes that are not the ones foreseen and intended by a purposeful action'.

We get them in beading circles in the twenty-first century too! Usually they appear in the form of a face, alien or otherwise. Occasionally the consequences are more dire and other parts of the human anatomy materialise out of the bead work in question! Frustratingly their presence is never apparent until said bead work is COMPLETELY finished and often not even then. Perhaps not until ones vision is focused through the lens of a camera...

Precisely what happened to me when I tried to photograph this piece. No need to tell you which part of the human anatomy accidentally made its way into this collar! How did I not see that the whole time I worked on it? Of course once I'd seen IT there was no unseeing it.

Many of you would have seen it too. I posted photos of it on social media where it got a lot of comment and garnered some good natured teasing. Despite its unfortunate resemblance many people liked it, and said that I should still put it into the gallery where I sell my work and market it as a fertility piece. Advice that I did consider because despite the appendage I really quite liked it myself. In the end I decided against it, mostly because the gallery is in the heart of Sydney's historic centre and many of our visitors come from overseas, from countries with more modest and conservative views, whom I did not want to offend.

So I put it away, intending to one day wear it myself with an LBD and a knowing smile. However both the right occasion and the right dress failed to present themselves, and because there were still a lot of things like the use of cane toad leather, the colours and the contrast of the rounded natural jaspers with the rectilinear geometry of the rest of the bead work (which is some of the neatest beading I've ever done!) that I liked about the collar I decided to rework it. This proved to be a much more difficult task than I anticipated. I'd used a lot of glue to adhere the various layers, there was no way to separate them without damaging the bead work so ultimately the alterations were limited to what I could cut off and re-edge, resulting in this:

I called it Calliope, after the gender switching central character in Jeffrey Eugenides' prize winning novel Middlesex and delivered it for sale to the gallery. To be honest I was a little indifferent about the end result - I think I liked the original better, but it taught me some very valuable lessons that I recall every time I make a new piece: I always check my layout at the design stage for resemblance to faces and body parts and when I glue my backing and/or stabilizer to my foundation I use a very thin layer of glue and keep it well away from the edges in the event that I need to separate them later. Also, if I'm unsure about the end result I'm mindful of making a quick decision because as time elapses the bond becomes stronger and stronger until it resembles concrete and the only way of getting the backing off is with a wrecking ball.

I also learnt, not for the first time, that even though a piece did not live up to my original vision of it, others would still find it worthy. And so it was... on the weekend Calliope was sold to a beautiful young lady visiting from Yunnan Province, China who very kindly agreed to pose for a picture. I love that my work gets to go home with someone with so much style and confidence. I'm guessing she's wearing traditional regional clothing but I think that skirt is really cool! Actually the whole outfit is...

Blowin' Bubbles

Designing to a Theme

What do you think about designing to a theme? Occasionally it has been suggested that competitions have a theme or a design brief. From what I've seen most people are against it because they say it's too limiting or think the results will be boring because all the submissions will look similar.

Personally, I like the idea. With my background in interior design I am very accustomed to designing to 'a brief". I would even venture to say that, usually, it makes things easier - gives me a starting point, narrows the parameters, provides a series of guidelines that I return to every time I need to make a decision throughout the creation process.

During my studies we were issued with a weekly assignment that was supposed to reinforce a particular design concept. It was handed out in the form of a design brief with quite limiting parameters, at the end of the week we would all pin up our work for critique. That was my favourite part. There were no two images that looked the same, the design solutions were as diverse as the students who created them and although we never picked 'winners' like we do in beading competitions, you could rationalise why one work was more successful than another based not only on its aesthetic qualities, but also on how well it answered the design brief.

I did say usually. This year's Australian Beading Competition was titled 'Fun and Laughter'. Now, anyone who knows me would tell you that fun and laughter could not possibly describe my design sensibilities. In real life I am fun, I promise! But creatively speaking, I am the antithesis of fun and laughter - I like dark, creepy, moody....no Disney movie, happily ever after version for me! I'm all about the Brothers Grimm, the children were eaten by the witch version... I was stumped! For a long time! I had to have words with myself: "If you keep saying this is too hard, it will prove to be beyond your capabilities - that's a loser-ish attitude. Think! What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear fun and laughter?"

Easy! No one knows how to laugh and have fun more than kids. I thought about the joy of my kids giggling when they were little...what made them giggle?? They loved chasing soap bubbles in the back yard. Delighted in the 'pop' when one hit their body, squealed when the breeze lifted the trail of bubbles out of their reach and couldn't wait for the hose to go on when it was time to wash the suds off their chubby little fingers.

In the halcyon bubble blowing days of my memory it was always early summer - the grass was a verdant green and carpet soft underfoot, the skies were crisp, blue and cloudless and the bubbles were oil-slick perfect every time. And there was my colour scheme on a platter - the new Swarovki Ultra AB rivolis in Blue, Green and Emerald that I'd first thought were too psychadelic in their brightness, larger rivolis in White Patina and transparent white AB seed beads shimmering with the colours of the rainbow exactly like a soap bubble. Next, the form...for the competition we were restricted to a medium sized bust because of the cabinet size so I wanted to make something wearable-y modest in size and concentrate on trying to make it exquisite. I googled images of bubbles...the image above provided the form - it made me think of the exquisite artisan hemispheres of Anna Chernykh that I'd always longed to incorporate in my work and a trail of soap suds that I knew instantly how I'd create.

And there it was, that moment of inspiration...you know the one that you actually feel as a current of electricity runs through your body and you see a complete image in your head? It doesn't happen often for me, but when it does the piece is always a joy to make.

And it was! I thought I might struggle a little because the colours are totally out of my comfort zone but because the concept was so fully fleshed out in my mind, I just enjoyed the process. I didn't even mind all the time it took to individually weave all those little bubbles (based on Nancy Cain's wonderful design for a hollow beaded bead from Beadwork December 2010/January 2011).

Sadly, the Australian Bead Show was cancelled (not for the want of trying but due to the tyrannies of bringing a very small population of beaders and vendors together across a very large country) and along with it went the 2016 Beading Competition. But I still had a piece that I was really proud of. I felt I'd met the design challenge (and for me it really was a 'challenge') and because I'd once again experienced that perfect state of being that Elizabeth Gilbert describes in her book Big Magic (Bloomsbury, 2015)  thus '...the highest degree of human happiness is eudaimonia, which basically means "well-daemoned" - that is, nicely taken care of by some external divine creative spirit guide...'. That very rare sensation you get when you see in your head exactly what you're going to make rather than getting there by trial and error. It had been so long since I'd felt it, that I'd begun to think that I had imagined ever experiencing it.

There is a also a happy postscript to this story. Since I'd been an early bird and made it well before the publicised submission date I took the opportunity to enter it into Bead Dreams instead. Happily it has been juried in as a finalist, so Blowin' Bubbles still gets to compete!

When the chips are down

New Discoveries...

When I find myself betwixt and between - finished a big project but the idea for a new one hasn't fully matured - rather than do something productive like attend to my website or practice CorelDraw or, heaven forbid, do housework, I like to make cuffs. They're just the right size, not too big of a project but big enough to get your teeth into and explore new ideas, discover something new.

Not that I need a new idea as an excuse. Usually, I make them just for fun, starting with my stash of gemstones and crystals and playing around with combinations until something speaks to me. Its become a bit of a habit so this time I thought, what could I do differently? 

I'd just bought some strands of gemstone chips. One, to create a fringe for a collar I'm planning and the other because it was Amazonite and I find it impossible to resist. 

With fringing on my mind I wondered that I hadn't seen many fringed cuffs. The ones that I'd seen had fringing built off the horizontal edges - either falling into your plate on the edge closest to your hand, or just a short one off the other end, otherwise where would the fringe go when your arm is hanging down by your side? How would a fringe look if it hung vertically down the cuff, parallel with the arm? Not too long so it doesn't get in the way, just a bit of a sashay to catch the eye as you move your hands in conversation (What, doesn't everyone speak with their hands?)

A fringe is good but what about the body of the cuff? I thought it might be nice if the whole cuff was encrusted with the gemstone chips and the fringe looked like it was spilling off the cuff. So I had my focal - one hundred or so of them. Time to pick the supporting cast: a few sew on crystals to add interest and these gorgeous opal white vitrail coloured O-beads. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with the O-beads at this stage but I liked the way their colours tied the amazonite and the honey colours of the crystals together.

So far I was excited, placed the crystals and I was off sewing the chips down with a single little size 15 as a stop bead. That excitement lasted all of five minutes. This was way harder than it looked! Not only were the chips all different shapes (I already knew that!) but none of them had a flat base and the holes were not parallel to anything. I bet you can tell that just from looking at the photo right? Never occurred to me! I had marked out a rectangular cuff that was about 6cm (2.5 inches) wide. There was no way I was going to cover the whole thing with the chips and not go crazy. 

I didn't want to make it narrower as that would reduce the amount of fringe it could have and I thought that straight edges would work better with the angularity of the chips so no cut-outs...Bingo! I'd make the centre two-thirds of the cuff in the chips and blend those O-beads into the last third either side of the clasp, they'd be much easier to use....Yes and no. I'm a bit of a perfectionist (did I hear 'a bit?" muttered sotto voce), I hate any foundation showing and of course I zoom focus in on every square millimetre so I couldn't help trying to cram a bead into spaces where only half a bead would fit causing the surrounding O-beads and chips to move and overlap. The whole time I worked on this cuff I could feel myself grinding my teeth, my shoulders would creep up towards my ears whilst I death gripped my needle. Eventually I had to let go, calmly tell myself that I'd pre-coloured my foundation and no one but me could really see the gaps. It felt like aversion therapy!

Of course it felt like it took forever but at least the fringe was a breeze and I like the result. The way the fringe swings when you walk and the chips gently tinkle as your hand moves - it makes me want to go out to dinner and rest my elbows on the table and talk with my hands.

So, I made quite a few new discoveries during the creation of this piece...a fringe on a cuff can work. I don't like using gemstone chips unless its for fringing (which is a real shame because they're as cheap as...well, chips. $1.80 for the strand and I've still got some left over), I'm a bit OCD (already knew that). Also, because the cuff was quite wide I thought rather than make the edges that the clasp is attached to straight I'd splay them out a bit so the gap between the clasp would remain equidistant, thus making one horizontal edge wider than the other. What I didn't take into account was that this would limit wearing the cuff to only one wrist because if you flip it over to the other arm the narrowest part of the cuff ends up on the widest part of your wrist, or the fringe ends up on the inside of your arm, closest to your body. And finally, I discovered that the finished cuff does not look good laid out flat (explaining the lack of a photo here), which creates a display problem for me as I need some sort of elevated cuff form that allows the fringe to hang down. 

So I'll just have to keep it!