Show us your work

Saving the planet one bead at a time

Maureen724 — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:08:20 GMT

My new obsession: creating bead bracelets from recycled materials found around the house. We're selling these and donating 10% to non-profits that support environmental causes.

Please let me know what you think by visiting my website at www.reemoe.com.

Thanks,

Moe

Merry All the Time (Hollow Bead)

shaktipaj — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:21:07 GMT

I had a commisioned trade with a friend fro this one - she gave me free rein and lots of time - I'm very glad she did! I was stuck after the two halves in the second shot, and it took me a while to work out what I wanted for the center, as well as how to achieve it.

The finished bead is 2.25in. by 1.0 in. - a larger focal. She wants me to 'cook' it -that means an LOS treatment, LOL. I think that is a good idea - more detail and drama in the piece. The photos are quick 'n dirty, plus I was trying out a weird grainy texture, almost newsprinty. I'll stick to the basics next time....

So anyway - any thoughts or questions?

Perri

iolite ring after LOS + another one

IzaMalczyk — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 10:05:45 GMT

I did it, I've oxidised the ring... Royal Denim looked like that before LOS:

now it looks like that:

But I made another ring today, it's called the Poseidon's Eye and it's aquamarine and labradorite in S&F silver.

I like it, I must admit, and I don't now why I've been so reluctant to make rings...

Thank you :)

Black pearl triangle

cicigabeltang — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 05:37:10 GMT

Hi everyone, Nice to have this forum to meet you girls/guys. I was so exciting last night and read through all your works and many linked website! Very impressive!

This is a charm made from fine silver and a black pearl. At the beginning I just wanted to make use of some silver scrap and a black pearl in hand. Then I came out this idea to make a cufflink for my husband. Later on I found it looks better in my bracelet.

I feel the work is still very rough, anyway I like the combination. Welcom to give your comment. Thanks!

SWAR EARRINGS

eljbabette — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:56:38 GMT

Hi, everyone! This will be my first photo post, so, I hope it comes out (dang it) without bein' too big; it shouldn't be, since, it's only 300 x 240...

ok, that worked! woot!

I've never made this type of earring and I gotta say...It's tough! I mean, I wanted to keep adding and adding...tryin' to make it even...and so on...aarrgghh! I think they turned out pretty cute...

thanx,

elly

Folded 4 in 1 Collar ( chain maile)

slcuniques — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:32:18 GMT

I am not sure if I'm doing this right but here goes. This is a 4 in 1 folded over collar necklace. The Sterling silver "V" is actually a part of the whole piece that folds back over itself in the front. Really 3D .. The backdrop is also a continuation of the whole piece but it lays flat against the skin in a "V" where the Silver "V" fold over the front of it.. It's a mix of copper and Sterling silver. The chain around the neck is a 4 in 1 calico mix of sterling silver and copper in a random pattern. It's in the tumbler right now so I don't have a pic of the hand forged clasp but if anyone is interested in it, I'll show it after it's done.. This is going up on my website tomorrow. Does anyone have an idea about WHAT to price this one at..? I usually use the formula but when I calculated it, it seems way too high.. Thanks for looking y'all!! Let me know what ya think please? I can definitely take constructive criticism. Compliments are welcome too, of-course. *smiles* Hope this works!

Some past wax carvings...

onewaxcarver — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:58:23 GMT

I'm new to this and I thought I would post some past custom hand wax carvings. These are all belt buckles I carved for a client. I love my work and was hoping to meet other wax carvers here to share and learn from.

Newby....

suzdezigns — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:46:58 GMT

Hi everybody,

I am a new member to this forum.. I am very interested in wire making jewelry and I have a blog that shows pictures of jewelry that I have made. Please feel free to leave comments and also some new ideas on wire wrapping.

Thanks Suzdezigns

http://suzdezigns.blogspot.com

Halloween Beads!

Kandice_Seeber — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 01:43:26 GMT

Cool new forum layout! Here are my new Halloween beads. :)

A few recent pieces..

taogemstones — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:04:22 GMT

Just to share !

Coldworked Glass Beads: "recycled sea glass", fibereye, obsidian, etc

DVHdesigns — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:48:36 GMT

Hi Folks,

I continue on with my pattern of "going rogue" in my lapidary work. I haven't cold worked any glass beads in a long time so I have recently been making some as I get ready for the Portland, Oregon Bead Bazaar next weekend. Here's a little about how I got into making handcrafted beach glass beads, along with subverting the dominant "shiny" paradigm in glass with my matte finishes, and some of my newest work....

Back in the mid 90's I noticed some local art jewelers who were using beach glass in their work. I asked one gallery owner in Seattle how a certain jeweler got so much uniform beach glass for her production work. She let me in on the secret that this jeweler made her own beach glass. A light went on in my head! I could easily make my own beach glass! Since then I’ve collected all kinds of patterned glass from Value Village, Goodwill, garage sales, and even my Grandma’s estate. I’ve been making all sorts of unusual pieces from this. No two are ever exactly alike. I cut up the glass on my diamond saw, shape it, sand it (120 and 220 grit by hand), drill it if it’s going to be a bead, and then tumble just overnight with 600 grit to create a satinny, uniform, matte finish. I call it "Handcrafted Recycled Sea Glass." I hope you enjoy my creative recycling efforts as much as I do making them!

Here's a selection of pieces made from a green glass hob nail salt cellar, a beer colored patterned glass (what does one call glass with consistent round bubbles on it), baroque amber colored pressed glass ashtrayite and the purple is scrap art glass from a glass blowing studio.

What I most like in working with and then tumbling the patterned press glass is that the smooth parts and the "high" parts of the pattern get all satin smooth while the recessed, depressed parts of the glass STAY shiny, so it creates great contrast! I also made this 3 bead suite out of an old ashtray with these wonderful graduated round bumps...There's a little bit of residula pink paint that coverd the glass still in the grooves of the pattern. It didn't come out in the tumbling but I might have to give it a good scrubbing with a toothbrush and some lava soap to get it out.

The glass in this group is from the lens of a large GREEN TRAFFIC LIGHT that was made here in the USA (printed on the glass) by Kopp Glass. Hence, I am happy to offer for your beading and ornamentation pleasure GREENLIGHTITE, also known as GOLIGHTITE. The color is actually a beautiful blue green. Found at busy intersections across the world, green Golightite is a wonderful symbol of free access and easy advancement on the road of life....

By now, many people have seen the colorful, mass produced, glassy, cat's eye simulant beads and carvings that come out of China, often called FIBEREYE. All those bright colors and chatoyancy come from glass fiber optic (jewelry grade, not communications grade) that is colored, fused, and mass produced in China. When one cuts parallel to the fibers, they form the cats eye effect or chatoyance (from the French "chat oeil", or cat eye). If one cuts so the glass fibers are lined up from top to bottom, an image is literally transmitted from one end or side of the cab or bead to the other. There are very few lapidaries that work in this material or do the kind of work I do in it. I got this lovely colored material some years ago through an Australian company's American warehouse where I've done business for years. I decided to leave many of my pieces of fibereye matte finished because it gives the chatoyancy a very soft, lustrous quality. Here's a bunch of my matte finished fiberye that I just made... The coffee cream colored one, 2nd from right, really shows off the cats eye-chatoyance of this material. The one on the far left is emerald green on the other side and rose on the top. One can buy this material two-tone or even three tone, as you can see from the display of cabs, dangles, and beads below...

One really has to move these around in the light to get a feel for their muted luminescence. The cabs on my biz card shows what happens when this is cut with the fibers front to back. You're not looking "through" the glass fibers as mush as the image below is being "imaged up" to the top of the surface of the cab via the fiber optics!

Last, but not least, not all the glass I cold work is man made! I resisted cutting much obsidian (natural volcanic glass) for a long time because it is sooooo hard to get a good scratch free polish on it, but I really, really like and prefer a matte finish on some obsidian, especially snowflake obsidian. Naturally obsidians with neat optical phenomena (rainbow, velvet peacock, red ribbon) look better with a high polish.

Thanks for letting me share and for those who are interested in my work, I have a dozen 99 cent auctions with no reserve closing on Sunday in my eBay store. Have a Happy Halloween, Samhain, & All Saints Day everyone.

Copper Clay work

Lorena Angulo — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:39:17 GMT

My faces were made with copper clay and are hand sculpted.

www.lorenaangulo.com

Some of my new designs

JoolieJoolery — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:46:05 GMT

These are chasing and repousse earrings. I wanted to share and get some feed back. They're about 2" long, 3/4" wide.

They're listed here:

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=31120451

My works

alex_amarfei — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 07:56:10 GMT

A couple of seahorses - double brooch

Terracota Necklace

BeBelle — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:55:29 GMT

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to share this piece with you. I recently started playing with multi-stone designs, and this one looks so fitting for our colorful New England fall.

Let me know what you think. I hope the image gets through.

Thanks!

Hurray for bakelite

baublestore — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:25:10 GMT

Please take a moment and visit me at:

http://www.baublestore.com

Theme for October- All Hallow's Eve, the spirits are dancing

Maille_Fantasy — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:06:23 GMT

The theme for October is 'All Hallow's Eve, the spirits are dancing'. Anything related to Halloween, ghosts and ghouls or spirits.

Guidelines

The work must be your own
The work must be original and previously unmade
You may use any materials you like, but this time, you MUST use more than one type of material (eg, metal and resin, polymer and wire, etc...not just metal) Which brings up, can you use just mixed metal, eg silver and gold. No, you will still need to add another medium
You may make any item you like
You may use purchased items to construct the item (although future themes may require the entire piece to be handmade)
You have until October 31st to submit a piece and it must include a photograph and a brief description of why this means 'All Hallow's Eve, the spirits are dancing' to you.
Photos and stories get posted to this thread as [Reply]'s.

I would encourage people to make a contribution. This forum is about sharing and I have been overwhelmed by the support and assistance provided by so many of you, not only to myself, but to anyone who poses a question or feedback.

Kelly.

Bracelets & earrings

ikstuart — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 19:33:15 GMT

I finally took some half-decent pictures of these so I can post them (grin)

This is a variation on a bracelet I made several months ago. It's a bit chunkier due to the twisted coil and I enjoy wearing it:

This is my first effort with byzantine and I inserted labradorite beads. I think I'm hooked and want to learn graduated byzantine and other weaves. I had to matching earrings (grin):

Thanks for looking!

Iris

Arbol de Vida

Lorena Angulo — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:28:49 GMT

This is one of my Arboles de Vida, trees of life, that I have in my collection.

The tree of life is very representative of my culture and folk art from Mexico.

It is made with pmc3 and is totally hand sculpted.

www.lorenaangulo.com

Teal On The Beach Sea Glass Bracelet

seagems — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:03:56 GMT

Hi Everyone,

It has been quite a while since I have shared any of our new sea glass jewelry designs with you, so here I am.

This piece was named "Teal On The Beach" and was inspired by the colors of the ocean, using Teal and Seafoam sea glass nuggets accented with sterling silver accent beads and handmade african beads in complimenting hues. This is a new design created for the fall.

Hoping to post more new designs as the season moves on. Presently sorting through tons of sea glass, getting prepared to create new pieces for the holiday season.

Copper ore & metal mineral beads & cabs

DVHdesigns — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:00:16 GMT

Howdy Beaders,

I've been on a bit of a spree around metal minerals recently! I grew up in a rock club in Michigan and there were always crazy bits of high grade metal mineral ores from the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan's Upper Peninsula passed around amongst the rockhounds and we went there once to collect on the mine dumps. As an adult and professional lapidary, I've delved deeper into working withmetal minerals and ores. There's an aspect of alchemy in it for me, taking the base metal and without smelting it, recreating it into something that has more value than the metals contained within. It's also neat to see, cut, and feel the density and intensity of the rocks and ores from which we get the metals necessary to modern life.

In some materials like the native copper, the veins of copper are from the purest deposits on Earth and native peoples were able to use and fashion this metal over 6,000 years ago. It was traded from the original deposits in the U.P. down the Mississippi and ancient Native American copper artifacts have been found as far away as Alabama. I made this bead out of a material called Kingston Conglomerate. It's like a natural concrete of brown and green stones with solid, dense veins of nearly pure copper running all through it like spiderwebs! Because the metal is so reflective it's a challenge to get it to show up in the image, but all the bronze-brown-shiny webbing in this bead is native copper...

My brother knows of my passion for metal minerals so I got a box of nice, exotic, rough ores for my birthday! By far the best was the high grade silver ore from Sudbury, Ontario. 1.4 billion years ago (right around the time the first fungal and bacterial life forms appeared on Earth), a giant meteroite slammed into the area of Canada just north of Lake Superior. The intense heat fused the metals in the Earth's crust together in this region creating one of the most metal ore rich areas on Earth. There was probably also a lot of iron and nickle in the meteorite that were mixed in. These beads and cabs were made from a high grade silver ore from that area. The ore is mixed with bits of cobalt, nickle, and other metals, but very close examination of the crystalline structures of the metal oxides along with drill testing revealed that this ore is more silver than the other metals. Unlike the cobalt ore, my drill bit actually encounters solid bits of silver metal while drilling these...

I also got a very intersting chunk of pyrite-marcasite that is heavily silicated (mixed in with and turned to quartz). Pyrite & Marcasite are about the same thing, mostly iron and sulfur, and were mined more for the sulfur content than the iron. Although it's shiny and golden metallic looking (commonly called "fools gold"), it can be very brittle in it's pure or more crystalline state. What's great about the piece I got is that the silication makes it very strong and stable with great bronzey and black variegation. This material is from Australia and I just got one piece of it, so don't know if more is available. I haven't seen it in suitable lapidary form like this before!

I'll conclude with Psilomelane, a manganese oxide, and the material I cut is usually heavily silicated. This lovely piece of dendritic psilomelane in chalcedony (quartz) with fine drusy quartz crystals at the top. This material is MOSTLY quartz, but the black dendrites of psilomelane are mostly a manganese oxide. It comes from N. Mexico but the few hobby mines that produced it have closed. Manganese is used to make alloys of steel and aluminum that are stronger and more resistant to oxidation (rust).

and this piece of psilomelane mixed with white agate. This second piece is probably from Northern Mexico. The manganese can make the chalcedony and agate EXTRA hard and very challenging to drill!

Thanks for looking! I'll return to metal minerals soon, although I'm probably going to be cutting mostly jet and soft things for awhile.

P.S. I'm also having a 30% off inventory clearance in my eBay store!

Milagro heart in PMC3

Lorena Angulo — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:14:05 GMT

This was one of my first pieces in metal clay. I think that this piece really marked a real start for me in creating my work with this wonderful medium.

It was published in the second PMC GUild Annual Book.

www.lorenaangulo.com

Mourning jewelry, gemstone jet, memorial pieces, etc.

DVHdesigns — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:34:52 GMT

Matthew 5:4 Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Hello folks, I thought I would start a thread about a subject that is near and dear to my heart. For the past several years I've been a little obsessed with mourning jewelry, it's history, and it's use. I'm especially fascinated with gemstone jet, an organic gemstone that is actually a mineraloid that is composed of 60 million year old fossilized wood. Mourning jewelry reached it's peak during Victorian times but people have made all different types of memorial jewelry for ages. Queen Victoria's mourning jewels were made with jet from Whitby, England. The Romans mined jet in England 2,000 years ago and exported it to other parts of the empire and jet ornament has been found dating 6,000+ years ago to the bronze age! I think hair jewelry is really cool and I like jewelry that uses photographs in them too.

I thought I'd share pics of work I've done with jet and I'd love to see images of other pieces of work that bead and jewelry artists have done in the format of mourning jewelry and memorial ornament, along with vintage pieces from others' collections, So if you have stuff to share or have questions or comments, this is the place!

I recently SCOURED the Tucson gem shows to find everything I could regarding gemstone jet. Sadly, the Tucson Show Guide doesn't even have a category for jet. I found one guy who had some jet from a no longer mined source in Tennessee and I bought ALL he had of the rough, his entire stock of 250 pounds. There was one other source for the rough and he was a Russian fellow who operates a jet mine about 100 miles from lake Baikal, just north of the Mongolian border. The Russian jet is clean and consistent, but it wasn't nearly as interesting as the Tennessee jet and the rough was much more expensive. I did get about 3 pounds of the Russian material to play with. Someone was there selling what they called Australian jet that was just an ugly, awful, fractured and pitted kind of coal!

Anyhow, I plan on doing a lot with the jet that I have and I'm interested in other people's relationship and reactions to mourning jewelry. I'm also really curious as to whether or not there is anyone else out there making contemporary mourning jewelry, or is it a custom that is as long forgotten as the Victorian mores that created this fashion and deeply personal ritual. I have dealt with a lot of grief in my life, losing my parents at a young age and for the past 25 years dealing with a long string of deaths of friends and loved ones due to the HIV-AIDS crisis, along with other tragedies. My work with jet and the creation of mourning jewels is a part of my process in dealing with my own grief and hopefully helping others deal with theirs.

Here are some beads from my "Broken Heart" series. I intentionally make these with one side that looks "perfect" and is nicely domed and polished, while leaving the other side with the natural "broken" surface that is smooth and buffed but shows the character of the breakage of the jet....

this large heart has little pyrite crystal spots on the natural face....

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and this large heart is not "broken" in that it is clean and consistent and polished all the way around...,

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and here's a lovely teardrop bead that has pyrite crystals on one side and is nicely domed on the other...

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and here are some examples of strands of the material from Russia that I hope to string some of these with....

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I'd like to make some rosaries and prayer beads but I need to do some more research into the rosary. Jet was used in rosaries in Spain and other parts of Europe from Medieval times.

Sooooo...anyone out there got any mourning jewelry?

A few metal clay pieces

Kenem Bijoux — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:57:44 GMT

It's been a long time since I've last posted and I wanted to share what I've been working on since my last posts. Took some time off from traditional metal work to give a shot at working with the metal clays. Your thoughts are welcomed:

Thanks for looking. Merci

New jewelry from Bulgarian artist

Ivo Borissov — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:10:49 GMT

Hello

My name is Ivo Borissov.Here is a piece of my jewelry. Here is my new work.Thanks everyone for the kind words .

Collection