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:

Latest Colorful Wire Squiggle Pendants

New in my Etsy shop...I'm going to do better about putting things in there so I can actually sell them instead of just looking at them here in my house!  If you're in Bedford, there are some of these at the Arts Council shop in the Anderson House and you'll see them at Arts on the Square in June.  :)


These are colorful versions of the wire squiggle pendants in nice, deep resin-filled bezels.  There's a pinky-peachy one...

And an ocean-inspired blue and green one...

Countryside Garden Flower Shots

I don't have beading tools with me, but I do have my camera, so I continue to look for color and texture inspiration.  Here are some shots from Countryside Gardens here in Bedford.  We were there picking up a couple of flower arrangements and I got a chance to shoot some blooms with no breeze blowing them all around!  You can almost feel the pollen coming off these babies!!  haaaaaaaaaa  Makes me want to go get some allegra.  :) 

Connecting in my hometown for an art show opportunity

I'm at home in my sweet little town of Bedford, Penna. on vacation.  Part of my "work assignments" for the week is meeting up with Heidi, who runs the shop at the Bedford County Arts Council Building.  There are now a ton of my finished jewelry pieces available for sale there.  She has done great work organizing the shop to feature work from all kinds of local artists:  photography, textiles, painting, prints, glass...you name it.  I'm thrilled to be a part of the group!

I have a message to pass on to all my crafty, artisan friends out there who may be near enough to Bedford and are interested in a smaller show in June.  The Arts Council is sponsoring "Arts on the Square" in downtown Bedford.  It used to be a one-day event, but to make it more worthwhile for exhibitors, it's now two days.  This year it's on Saturday and Sunday, June 25th and 26th.

This is a shot of my brother, a portrait artist,  doing a sketch of my mom.  :)  It's a family affair!

I realize the show is just around the corner, but still wanted to pass along the word because they're looking for about 10 more craftsmen/artists.  If I had the leave to spare, I'd be there, but instead I'm just doing some networking.  They don't have anyone who does lampwork or polymer clay nor do they have anyone who is just selling beads.  Plus, out of the 20 vendors they already have lined up, only three are jewelry--they try to keep the jewelry "competition"tough. :)

Please click on this link: Arts on the Square for more information or if you just want to find out more about the art community in my little town!

How I Made My Banner...

I'm pretty tickled with how my latest banner came out and thought I'd share some of the steps I take through Picnik to play with my photos and make it work.  The fun thing about Picnik is you can spend hours and hours playing or just make a quick effect change to make drama easily.  Of course I didn't think to do this when I actually made the banner, so I went through the steps again.  I don't write down the color/percentage formulas so I can't necessarily recreate it exactly, but you'll get the gist.

1.  The original photo that I took with my Canon Rebel after making Curt pull off the side of the road while driving around Alexandria a few weeks ago.  It's not "tack sharp" by any means because of the combination of my handheld camera and the breeze, but I love the shot because of the horizontal focal branch.

2.  I really wanted to capture that horizontal branch, so I cropped the photo so the branch moved along the bottom third of the field (roughly) and left a nice space over on the right hand side for a text box.  The key for banners is to then resize the cropped pic to 968 pixels wide.

3.  Before moving into Picnik's different effects, I did a quick adjustment of the color saturation to get a little more brightness.  The sliding scale is perfect because you can move it back and forth until you get just what you like.  I wouldn't have noticed that salmon-pinkish sort of background without the adjustments.  

4.  Then I went for effects.  This is "Bunny Tone" which "posterized" the details and softened the colors but then I added a dash of "Boost" that brings out the color in their new tones.

5.  Next I went to the HSL filter...first is a "cool version" of the photo.  I love the purples and blues with the bright yellow flowers, but that's not the look I was really going for.

6.  Still in the HSL filer, I made a few adjustments to see what I could find and came up with this peachy version which is a perfectly pretty version, but I still wanted more energy.

7.  A few more adjustments and I found the colors I really wanted and then went back to edit the saturation levels to get this bright pink and orange with a little purple deep in the background:

8.  When doing a banner, there are lots of different ways to put the text in there, but I really like using a rectangle "sticker" to create a more level background for the letters so the font doesn't get lost in the photo.  This is the initial look of a sticker on the photo and it's obviously a bit of a big black vacuum that doesn't do much to enhance the look of the photo:

9.  Adjusting just the rectangle, I changed the color to a sort of chartreuse-y yellow and then made it semi-transparent.  I like the way that block balances with the focal flowers on the left-hand side.

10.  And, finally, I added some text.  There are lots of cool fonts to choose from, so it's always a challenge for me to pick.  I think this one is called Pepe.  I adjusted the color a bit and then used a filter to make it blend through the rectangle with the rest of the photo.

The last step for blogger is to go into the Design tab and add this photo into your header.  If you have it sized to 968 pixels, it'll fit right in there!  It seems like a whole lotta steps, but since each phase is such a fun experiment it doesn't seem to take all that long.  Go have a Picnik adventure for yourself!

Beach Day Photos

I'm on vacation today!  It has been such a fabulous day off.  Curt and I actually got up and went out to Buckroe Beach for a walk.  The sun is shining, a breeze is blowing, and I'm not at work:  all is right with the world.  


As we were walking out of the apartment building Curt turned to ask me if I wanted to bring my camera.  How sweet is that?  He was watching out for my creative brain that didn't even think about the camera before we left.  He even ran back up to get it.  What a doll!  


So, here are a few shots from our little walk down in the sand...

Love the purplish smooth lines of the shell next to the amber stones and other rough shell fragments.

Under the boardwalk down by the Chesapeake...

Just a little bit of color in the piles of "ocean stuff" on the shore.

The beauty of worn and empty

Some cool signage on the way home.

Cheers to another seven days off!!!  Whoo hooo!!  I'm going to take some of these photos over to Picnik and see what I can come up with.  Or, maybe I should actually learn to use the Photoshop Elements software that I bought!

Sunday Blossoms

Sharing a little spring flower mood on this Sunday evening...

I happened to wander over to Studio Waterstone and an effort to share the love...up close.  :)