I Finally Made Something Else for the Gluable Challenge - Rectangular Frame

Finally, a sunny day! Got out the MagicGlos and one of my Rings & Things Gluable Challenge frames.

I used the Rectangular frame (Stock#: 49-440-0 Approx. 52x13mm rectangle brass picture-frame charms, 3.5-3.8 inner diameter loop. 1.3-1.7mm thick. Fits 48x9mm image. Back is textured.)

I cut out a piece of the label from my favorite drink, Arizona Diet Green Tea, and glued it to the frame with Mod Podge, smoothed to remove air bubbles underneath. Then I took some 26 gauge brass wire, bent it around the picture, hammered it lightly and set on top of the picture. The reason for the wire is that I plan to use cloisonne beads in the necklace, so now the picture has a cloisonne-like look, too.

Coated it with a thin layer of MagicGlos, took it outside. Learned how quickly Magic Glos sets in sunlight, had to sand with a fine grit sandpaper under water to remove the lump I created, put another coat of MagicGlos on. Needs work, but it's a start. (click to enlarge for detail)

Thanks to Carmi's Art/Life World blog for her post about using MagicGlos - gave me the nudge I needed.

One of the Twitter-folk I follow, mySA_beading, mentioned a contest - Step by Step Beads Colorworks Challenge.

Enter the first Colorworks Challenge!

Tertiary Colors

The orange-purple-green tertiary triad presents a challenge of bold and striking contrasts. Create a piece of bead jewelry (or a bead in any medium: polymer, beads, glass, etc.) using the triad from the color wheel. Black, white, or clear are welcome, but the predominant colors must be the orange-purple-green triad (any shades of those colors).

As it happens, I'd begun work some time ago on a strung piece using those colors and copper. I won't show the whole piece, just in case I decide to enter, but here's a bit of it:

The workspace is a wreck, so I'm going to listen to City Arts and Lectures with Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen as I tidy up.

Holiday Jewelry!

I'll be setting up my winter themed Etsy photography soon, and adding some Christmas-y touches as appropriate - for example, for my red and green Christmas badge lanyard necklaces.

Here's a new one, finished tonight. The majority of the crystal beads are Czech faceted glass (some Jablonex, some from Bead Gallery) but the green bicones are Swarovski crystal I had purchased online but turned out to be the wrong shade of green for what I wanted to do. They're perfect for this necklace, though.

It's great to be beading (and blogging about it) again. I missed it even though I was just too tired in the evenings all this week and traveling last week. It'll be a while before I travel for any length of time, again, so I should be posting much more in the next weeks.

I will probably be getting some satin cord tomorrow for my cloisonné beads and seeing if I can do some Chinese knots with them for some necklaces and, perhaps, try out making a satin cord lanyard as well.

I don't like that it's getting dark so early, it limits the time I can have natural sunlight for my photography so I will need to do photographs earlier in the day - and I'm just not that well organized, nor a morning person. Regardless, I'll need to get this and my other Christmas colors lanyards up on Etsy this weekend.

Update from Florida

Well, I've been too busy all week to actually miss beading, until right now. I've finished my conferences and spent the day today wandering "around the world" at Epcot. I put some comments about my day and linked to some pictures about it on Twitter (I'm AWDawno there). I've been staying at the Disney Grand Floridian, which is a gorgeous hotel. If I could stay a few more day's I'd love to do the Wild Animal Park and then check out the city of Orlando, but I only had today, so I picked Epcot as I'd heard there was a Wine and Food festival going on. There were great booths all around the World Showcase with wines and foods from all over.

In one of the stores in the China section there was a container of (mostly) cloisonné beads and I scooped up quite a few of them. Not having any other materials to work with here on my trip means I'll have to wait until I get home to figure out how I want to use them.

In the Italy section, I visited a store with a lot of Murano glass jewelry but didn't see anything I liked all that much and, of course, the retail price made buying something already made and then de-constructing it for my own use rather silly.

I have a long day ahead, going to get to bed soon and take advantage of that extra hour! Even though this will show a post time of 7:00-ish, I'm three hours ahead and tired from walking around Epcot for about seven hours today.