RESIN IN THE AFTERNOON

Mary and Nancy, embedding bits and pieces into resin.

Susan, who was visiting from Colorado and her stepmom, Mary.

Nancy, pouring resin one drip at a time into a bottle cap bezel.

Pam giving it a try.

All of our finished pieces!

I had a resin class this afternoon at Bead Haven. I like weekday afternoon classes because it feels like I'm in summer camp doing crafts in the middle of the day! Plus, I got home in time to watch the Tour de France, which I am addicted to. We had a good time picking out papers, transparencies, egg shells, and other little bits to embed into bezels. We had bottle caps, silver plated rings with bezel cups soldered onto them, brass bezels, etc. to play with. I always bring all kinds of things to embed and sometimes people bring some of their own things in. Nancy had lots of cool papers that she kindly shared with us. My favorite was some yellowed pages of an old book of Chinese text. Pam brought a small piece of fabric with an adorable sock monkey on it and used it in a bottle cap pendant that turned out really cute. What is it about sock monkeys? I love them! Everyone made such cute things. Mary made a ring with paisley paper in it that I liked a lot. I also liked Susan's ring that she embedded an old postage stamp in. Pam did a bottle cap with a hula girl that I was very fond of. My favorite of Nancy's was a bezel with a fish jumping out of the sparkly (glittered!) water.

I enjoyed all of the gals and thank them for a great afternoon.

PS. If any fellow bloggers out there know why sometimes my photos wont blow up when you click on them ( Like now! GRRRR!) and how I can fix it, I'd really appreciate your help! Send me an email, if you know the answer. Keep in mind that I'm a little technologically challenged! Thanks- Cris

RESIN REVISITED

A bottle cap bezel filled with resin.

A bunch of resin filled bottle caps from a previous class.

A Sanskrit verse embedded in resin.

Resin earrings with a Greek poem.

A sampling of bezels used for class.

This Wednesday, July 15th I'm teaching a resin class at Bead Haven from 1-4pm. There are still a couple of spaces available, so if you have the afternoon off, or can play hooky for a few hours, come and join us!

Call the store for more info at 319-247-2323.

SUMMER

Paul, hiding behind 12 of our 36 tomato plants.

The view from our patio. Please don't look at the weeds!

A friendly little pollen drunk visitor. There's beauty everywhere, isn't there?

Paul and I spent the day working in our yard. After days of excessive heat and then unbelievable torrential rains, the gardens remind me of that show on the History Channel, 'Life After People'. Let's just say, I haven't been keeping up with the work. If you know me personally, you know that I don't like hot weather. A few of my friends and relatives (you know who you are!) have even implied that I am not as nice as I could be when I am hot. So, anyway, not much has gotten done outside lately. Today was a perfect midsummer day and we did get lots done. Paul chopped up a big branch that fell from one of our trees the other day in another wind storm, while I weeded our front yard. I filled up both of our yard waste barrels and I still have more to go. It looks a lot better though. At least it looks like someone lives here!

ONE DAY, TWO CLASSES

This photo is from an earlier class, but I forgot to take one this afternoon.

Clockwise from the top, Barbara's cuff and copper discs with the dots, Connie's dragonfly, copper cross-hatched discs and large hammered domed and heat patinaed discs, and David's triangular pendant and domed 'optical illusion' discs.

I taught two classes at Bead Haven today. First, I did the slide tube bracelet class and then later in the afternoon I taught an ever popular, acid etching class. Everybody did great job. I never get tired of acid etching. I think it'd because you never really know what you're going to get. I think it's exciting.

I've still been playing around with the enamels for the last few days. They're really intriguing. I think it's one of those great things that's so easy to play with, but you could spend your whole life becoming accomplished at it. I'm really enjoying it, but I need to get back to real work and get some jewelry put together with all of the parts that I've been making the last few weeks.

FOOD, FAMILY, FRIENDS AND THE FOURTH

A not so great photo of tonight's fireworks. 

Maybe Suz can do better.

Doesn't Paul look happy?

We had a great day today.  Visited family, ate lots of great food, then got home just in time to call our friend Suzi and watch the fireworks.  Had a limeade and burger at Sonic (yum!) and went home and got to watch the replay of the prologue first day of the Tour de France.  I'm watching right now, in fact.  I have serious love of watching cycling, especially the Tour, which is weird, since I don't get on a bike too often these days (my Airdyne doesn't count!).  I have watched every day of the Tour for the last several years.  I do love it, so today couldn't get much better!  I hope your day was great too!  

I just watched Lance start his Tour comeback in the time trial and he did great!  Go Lance, go!

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY

Today, I'm going to celebrate our country's independence by going to Independence (Independence, Iowa, that is).  I'm spending the day at my parents house in my home town.  We're going to eat a bunch of food, play bocce ball and have a good time and I hope you all celebrate well with your family and friends, too!

ENAMEL

Copper discs, ready for dapping.

Domed and cleaned and ready to go!

A copper disc, covered with enamel being torched from below.

The enamel beginning to melt, looks like melting sugar.

The clear enamel, fully fused on the copper.

Some of my first tries.

Another shot of my first attempts.

Wow, it's almost been a week since I last posted.  I'll try not to do that again or you all might not come back!  I haven't been feeling very creative lately and I haven't felt like I had much to say.  When I feel like that, I've found that the best thing to get me going again is to try something new.  I've been itching to try enameling for a long time now.   I'd really like to get good enough at it to teach a basic class, plus I just love the look of enameled metal.  I got a couple of books and got out the enamels that I bought a year ago (I know, my bad!) and I set to work.  I have to say, this is the most fun I've had working in quite a while.  I did a basic, easy torch method because I thought might be good as most people can afford to buy a torch but maybe not a kiln.  I used Thompson enamels and copper.  I only had transparent enamels and I think I would prefer opaque ones for the copper, but it was ok for a first try.  I want to try it for a bit with copper and then try with fine silver when I feel a bit more comfortable.  Since the transparent colors were, um, transparent, I couldn't really get deep complex colors with them with out building up the colors in many layers.  I also tried a make-shift raku treatment using some dead leaves in a tin can, putting the hot, enameled piece in the can and clamping the lid down until it cooled off.  This gave me my favorite results.  

I think I might love doing this!  It will go along perfectly with the metal work that I'm already doing and it will be a great new class to teach at Bead Haven and here in my studio.  And as for perking up my creative juices, I'm already thinking of what to do next with it.  So, the moral of the story is, if you have something sitting around at home that you've wanted to try, but just haven't gotten to, get it out and give it a try this weekend!