A “parliament” or “wisdom” of whimsical owl earrings.
Each month Erin Prais-Hintz presents a theme, with inspiration photos, and invites jewelry designers to create earrings for the “We’re All Ears” challenge. The earring design challenge theme for March is owls. Continue reading
Each month Erin Prais-Hintz chooses a theme and challenges us to design earrings inspired by it. The theme for this month’s We’re All Ears earring design challenge was “patchwork.” I’ve noticed a bit of patchwork showing up in clothing fashion lately and had been pondering how to create some earrings in that style. The images Erin shared for this design challenge were exactly the push my muse needed. Continue reading
Here there be Dragons! The theme for the winter design challenge from the Art Elements team is dragons. I love dragons. Love! So naturally I signed up to participate. I usually make jewelry for these design challenges. But, since Art Jewelry Elements became Art Elements, I did not have to limit myself to jewelry or jewelry components. However, I stayed in the general vicinity of jewelry, by making jewelry boxes. Continue reading
The eye candy from my 2016 jewelry and component making.
Continuing with a long-standing tradition I began many three years ago, I’m summing up my blog posts for the year. I wasn’t as prolific with my posts this year (I even skipped a month!) but I still feel I was creative and continued to grow my skills. Continue reading
These are all the polymer clay feather focals I carved, molded, and colored for my new jewelry collection.
I’m so excited to introduce my new jewelry collection – Of a Feather – featuring my hand-carved feather focals. I’ve been working on this new jewelry collection for quite a few months, making the feathers in batches according to color and finish. I’ve got aged and distressed metals, faux ceramics, metallics, and even some inspired by real birds. Continue reading
I’m kicking off fall with the Art Jewelry Elements design challenge. Their theme is “trees” and they shared many inspiration images and ideas on their blog. I had some grand plans, as usual. And, as often happens, I didn’t get around to most of them. Continue reading
When the team at Art Jewelry Elements announced “art headpins” as the challenge theme for August I was fairly certain I would join in. But I did wait a few weeks before signing up, because I wanted to be sure I would actually have some headpins to show on reveal day. The challenge is to create art headpins in any medium, or use art headpins in jewelry designs. Continue reading
Campfire. Photo credit : Luke Porter | Unsplash
The theme for this month’s We’re All Ears earring design challenge was campfires. I haven’t been camping in a very long time. My family took quite a few camping trips when I was growing up. My favorites trips were the ones near alpine lakes and meadows. I love the smell of pine forest covered in morning dew. Of course, I also love the smell of smoldering mesquite wood, which is what we used to build our fires when camping in riverine canyons. Continue reading
Earrings inspired by hot air balloons.
The inspiration for this month’s We’re All Ears earring design challenge was hot air balloons. Our hostess shared photos of brightly colored contraptions against beautiful blue skies. Was my earring design inspired by all that color? Continue reading
The song of cicadas is a fond summertime memory.
The Art Jewelry Elements team chose ‘Summertime’ as the theme for their June design challenge. I signed up to participate, even as I was thinking “How I am going to get inspired by my least favorite season?” Initially I planned to design jewelry that represented what first comes to my mind when I think of summer. But how would I translate “sweltering” into jewelry? Continue reading