Art Elements Theme of the Month: Stars

This month Laney Mead over at the Art Elements blog chose the theme of "Stars" for the theme of the month.  At first glance, the theme seems pretty specific, but she left it open for a broader approach.

My first design plays on the star of the ocean... the starfish!  I had gotten the idea to put a bunch of Unicorn Beads drops along my bracelet chain (instead of a different type of bead I've been using) from one of my fellow Inspired by Nature retreat goers.  I thought that these turquoise with white, cream, and black had a beach feel and coordinated nicely with the two-holed starfish bead from Heather Powers of Humblebeads.  I added a fun shell charm and some Czech glass beads to the clasp side of the bracelet to finish things off.

I remembered that I had some Twinkiedinky charms that I bought a while back.  They have a quote on them from Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers...  "You can't expect two stars to drop in the same field in the same lifetime."  So the star theme plays out here in words instead of shapes or images, but I've been waiting for an excuse to play with these!

Lastly, I ended up making one Christmas ornament with a star pattern across a heart shape.  I used a borrowed rubber stamped image as the resist for this salt water etched copper.  I added the little dots around the border by hand with a Sharpie.  That one sold at last Sunday's Holiday Market but the other 4 are still available.  :)  I plan to work on another round of these ornaments this week.

This is a blog hop!  Take some time to see what starry creations that everyone else created!

Guest Artists

Jill

Divya

Alysen 

Kathy 

Tammy 

Cat 

Samantha

Anita

Karin

Sarajo - you are here

Rosantia

Kimberly

Art Elements Team

Jen 

Jenny  

Niky 

Laney 

Claire 

Cathy 

Marsha 

Caroline

Susan

Lesley

Honey Do List November 2018

Wow!  I don't know about you, but the time sort of got away from me this month between Thanksgiving and preparations for my first brewery show of the holiday season.  That's why I'm getting this posted a bit later in the day than I had hoped.  

This marks the third year that my husband Eric has been giving me a design challenge each month to get me out of my comfort zone and to help clear out my bead stash... it's the Honey Do List 2018!  I know that I'm not the only one who loves a good design challenge, so I'm hoping folks will continue to play along with us!  

Here's this month's inspiration and what Eric had to say about it:

I wanted to use a shot from our trip to the Czech Republic for this month's challenge.  I took a lot of cool architectural shots, but most are pretty lacking in color--something I feel like we need for this kind of challenge.  I thought this art nouveau mural would be fun and full of colors and interesting motifs.  

This was just one of the lovely buildings we saw on our trip in August.  (I swear, one day I'm going to get my pictures off my phone!  Until then, I highly encourage you to check out my husbands blog chronicling our journey.  Here's a link to the first post for Beerploma HERE!)  I love this inspiration photo but really didn't have much in my art bead stash that really worked for it.  Luckily for me Anne Gardanne of Gardanne Beads had a show recently and I snagged not one but two things that ended up being perfect!  (Full disclosure, I bought WAY more than these two things.)

First up I made a pair of earrings with some decal pieces that had a great floral motif.  The colors are more pastel than the inspiration but I think they fit the inspiration.  I paired Anne's lovely enamel work with some faceted prehnite rounds and some tiny pink Czech glass flowers topped with green crystals.

I'm so amazingly happy with the necklace that I made with the cool semi-circle pendant that I snapped up.  Both the colors and the floral/leafy pattern are just perfect, if I do say so myself!  I made links with Czech glass and some dumortierite rounds and finished things off with a pretty brass clasp with a small glass rondelle decorating the toggle side.

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Inspired by Reading: The Rules of Magic

I'm a little bit behind on posting my creation for the October installation of the Inspired by Reading Book Club... mostly because I've been crazy busy with shows and travel.  Better late than never, but this is a super short post!

The October selection was The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman which is a prequel to her super popular Practical Magic.  While I enjoyed reading the story of the Owens family and how each of the children dealt with the ramifications of the family curse, my creation was more inspired by the cover of the book.  The cover really plays on the time period of the book... the 1960s... and I took my cue from that. 

I was in a frenzy of painting with my Vintaj patina paints and added color to these sweet little daisy or sunflower charms.  I'm super happy with how my paint job turned out with just a tiny hint of bronze on the stem and leaves as well as the center of the happy yellow flowers. 

Sorry for the brevity of this post... but there's so much on my plate right now and I'm zipping off to tackle the next 20 things on my ever-growing to do list!  Enjoy the day!

Inspiration for the November Honey Do List

This marks the third year that my husband Eric has been giving me a design challenge each month to get me out of my comfort zone and to help clear out my bead stash... it's the Honey Do List 2018!  I know that I'm not the only one who loves a good design challenge, so I'm hoping folks will continue to play along with us!  

Here's this month's inspiration and what Eric had to say about it:

I wanted to use a shot from our trip to the Czech Republic for this month's challenge.  I took a lot of cool architectural shots, but most are pretty lacking in color--something I feel like we need for this kind of challenge.  I thought this art nouveau mural would be fun and full of colors and interesting motifs.  

The reveal date will be Monday, November 26th so you've got the long Thanksgiving weekend to work on something if you need it.  To make it super easy for you to participate and share your creations, I'll set up an Inlinkz link up so folks can add their blogs as they are ready.  Just stop by my blog starting on November 26th and join the fun!  I'll leave the link up open for a while... so you have plenty of time to add your links.  (Last month's is still open... check it our HERE.)  No blog?  No worries!  Feel free to send me a picture of your creation and some brief comments and I'll happily share in my blog post.  You can reach me at sjdesignsjewelry@gmail.com  The more the merrier, so I hope you'll play along with me this month!