It's Last Friday!!

It's a big day here in Hampton...it's almost the last Friday of the month and that means a lot of things:


a.  I only had a three day work week and it's almost over.
b.  I get to learn weaving tomorrow at Art & Soul over at the convention center.
c.  I have to finish my Art Bead Scene challenge piece for April.
but...most importantly for right now...
d.  It's the inaugural Artisan Clay Design Team reveal!!!


First off, I have to give a little intro to Kristie Roeder, the creative force behind Artisan Clay.  I initially found Kristie's work out here in blog world when I found the Beads of Clay group.  I used to be a glass-artbead-only kind of girl before I discovered all the goodness in clay, porcelain and ceramics.  Now I have more than one "special art bead" drawer full of little earthenware art pieces...lots of them happen to be Artisan Clay originals.  I love being able to support a fellow Pennsylvania girl and was thrilled when she came up with the idea for a design team to feature her work.  Luckily, I got in on this first round and got to work with one of her latest styles in a metallic bronze finish.  There are five different designers who got to work with five different styles, all in a similar finish.  I'll point you to those other blogs later in the post, but for now, here are a few examples of the raw material I got to work with:

Since it's a nice substantial, rugged donut, I decided to make it part of a focal design.  It could've stood all on it's own with a simple leather knot but I decided to take it a couple of steps further.

I happened to have this phenomenal lampworked glass bead from Alice St. Germain that I picked up recently from the artist herself in Philly.  The rustic, soft colors of the bead softened the rugged "edge" of the donut and I had to have them together.

The lighting on my photos isn't the greatest, but you should be able to see that I used a couple of different leather scraps--some skinny and some more thick and suedish--to pull the feminine into the design.  I just adore the color of the leathers which are sort of orange-coral-red-pink-awesome.

Aside from getting to revel in the world of clay and glass art beads, I feel like I kind of reached a personal milestone in creativity with this one...I didn't even think about looking for a ready-made clasp in my "ready-made-clasp" drawer and reached immediately for wire to make my own!  I'll throw a thanks out to Judy (my bead soup partner) and Cindy W. (who just makes awesome wire work) for the inspiration and helping me realize that a little bend and a couple of coils is a good thing.

I'm only one of the luckies this month so you've gotta see the rest: