Keep reading to see the in-focus designs.
Welcome to reveal day for the first annual Bead Peeps Swap ‘n’ Hop. This is a combination jewelry design challenge and blog hop, hostessed by Linda Anderson of Cherry On Top Designs.
Bead Peeps is a group of jewelry hobbyists, artists, and designers on Facebook. The Swap ‘n’ Hop is an event where some of us in that group signed up to swap artisan jewelry components, make jewelry with them, and then share what we’ve made on our blogs. Continue reading
Have you ever looked deeply into the eyes of a dragonfly? Martin Amm, the photographer whose macro photos of dew-drop covered dragonflies were chosen for this month’s We’re All Ears earring design challenge, gets you up close and personal with them. And they are truly things of beauty – the photos and the eyes.
Like most insects, dragonflies have multifaceted compound eyes. However, whereas most insects have a few thousand per eye (like around 6,000 in the common housefly), dragonflies have as many as 30,000 facets, or ommatidia, per eye. Ommatidia. What a fun word. Continue reading
Welcome to the third and final blog hop for the B’sue Boutiques Build a Line design challenge. My classmates and I are revealing the jewelry lines we set out to design, and sharing some things we’ve learned along the way, from each other, and from our instructor, Brenda Sue (aka B’sue) Lansdowne of B’sue Boutiques.
If you recall from Part 1 of my posts about this journey, I set out to create a line of “Elemental Lizards” with one necklace for each of the five elements. In Part 2, I showed you the mixed media pendant focals and accent beads I had created, but no finished jewelry designs. (I was saving them for today.) Continue reading
The teaser photo of what I sent my partner.
Phase Two of the first Bead Peeps Swap ‘n’ Hop is completed. My partner and I have exchanged the beads and other components we will be using to design jewelry for this challenge.
Now that we’ve sent and received our respective goodies, I can show you what we each will be working with for this jewelry design challenge and blog hop. Continue reading
The inspiration for this month’s We’re All Ears design challenge is a series of delightfully fanciful paintings with fresh flower accents. The artist behind the whimsical flower girl art is Malaysian artist and photographer Lim Zhi Wei (a.k.a Limzy).
This month is also the one-year anniversary of these monthly challenges on the Earrings Everyday Blog. I only learned of the blog and started participating in the challenges last fall. Each month’s inspiration has been more fun than the last. Continue reading
Here we are for Part 2 of the Build a Line design challenge (BALC for short) where I’ll be showing my progress in creating a line of jewelry using components from our sponsor and instructor, Brenda Sue (aka B’sue) Lansdowne of B’sue Boutiques.
In Part 1 of the challenge, the other participants and I revealed the themes we’d be exploring and components we would be using. Some of us (the over-achievers) even had a finished piece of jewelry or two to show off. In Part 3, coming up in a month from today, we will be debuting our completed lines, which must have at least five related pieces. Continue reading
I am thrilled to be participating in the Build a Line design challenge, hostessed by Brenda Sue (a.k.a. B’sue) Lansdowne of B’sue Boutiques.
The challenge is to design five pieces of jewelry that could form the basis of a line. The participants, nearly 60 jewelry designers, will be blogging about our progress along the way in a series of three blog posts, each about a month apart. This first post is to introduce ourselves and the concepts for our lines. Continue reading
The inspiration for this month’s We’re All Ears earring design challenge is Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2015. That color is “marsala” which Pantone describes as a “naturally robust and earthy wine red [that] enriches our minds, bodies and souls.” That’s not asking for much for a color now, is it?
I’ve heard (read) more than a few jewelry designers state how they are less than wowed by this color and the rest of Pantone’s choices for the spring season. They feel the color palette is too subdued and lacks oomph. Well, that’s just how I like my colors. Continue reading
If you’ve been around the blogoverse for a while, you’ve likely at least heard of, if not participated in or hosted, a blog hop. A blog hop, in case you aren’t familiar, is a virtual social event where blog authors share links to other blogs, so they and their readers can “hop” from one blog to the next and sample the offerings. Think “pub crawl” but without the public drunkenness or hangover.
At it’s most basic, a blog hop is a way to generate more traffic to your blog. But it can be so much more than that. It can be a community of like-minded people who gather in the blogosphere to share ideas, art, friendship, and more. Continue reading
We’re All Ears December 2014 Inspiration
The inspiration for this month’s We’re All Ears earring design challenge is this amazing anamorphic sculpture. It’s called “Breaking Wave” and is the creation of Plebian Design and Hypersonic.
You can see this amazing kinetic sculpture in person at Biogen-Idec’s new headquarters in Cambridge, MA. Or, you can watch this short film to see it in action, including the mechanism behind the art. Continue reading