“Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”

(Gone now.)

It’s a bit hard to get the perfect photo of this one, somehow.

On white, maybe?

Imploded flower!

Let’s talk more hard-to-photograph blues, with “Threatening expulsion”:

I guess white shows off that bubble better:

But the colors feel more accurate over black, somehow.

I sort of love this angle.

And then I went crazy with silvered dijon stringer, brass mesh, and a bunch of rockin’ deep colors in a wild shape, which totally begged to be named “Riotous & misconstrued”:

Other side:

It really wants to eat your brains.

“Now we dance a raucous lindy hop”:

I’m so not over just using a mandrel to plunge biiig bubbles instead just my tungsten probe. Whoa. Anyways, other side:

“Not even the rain”:

Brass bubbles in one side, coiled fine silver in the other, hung on a strand of what I think but am not sure is rutilated quartz. Yep.

Side view!

(As usual, you can buy my glass art jewelry at my Etsy shop!)

I’ve been making these long, elegant, dangly earrings with small bubbly spheres, in shades of orange and red.

I have some wacky awesome ideas for what I could do if I made a billion tiny bubblies like these. For example, this matching delicate necklace:

I turned others of those bubbly beads into earrings along these lines instead:

And long, elegant, simple pendants to match that more minimalist style:

A longer one:

A few of them split in half in the kiln, so I’m using them as cabs. My bezel settings still aren’t great, so this last pendant isn’t really sellable, but it’s getting closer.

In prep for this past weekend’s craft fair, I made a few smaller things, simple earrings and the like. Didn’t even manage to photograph all of them before they sold, which is both frustrating and exciting. (Mostly exciting!)

And some simple, light necklaces along these lines (this is the only one left at the moment, but I’ll make more when I get a chance):

(As usual, you can buy my glass art jewelry at my Etsy shop!)

“Thrice around the world”
(glass, silver, hand-dyed (not by me) silk ribbon)

The title is from Hitherby Dragons: Ways of Avoiding Migraines

Other side:

Wacky close-up:

“One dream may hide another”
(glass, silver)

Reserved.

The title is from One Train May Hide Another by Kenneth Koch.

“What will happen after”
(glass, silver)

The title is from Hitherby Dragons: The Little Rocket”

The relevant quote: “I have a thousand words for what will happen when I hit,” the rocket says, “but none for what will happen after.”

“Sound travels 95 miles across the grassland”:
(glass, copper, antique Japanese copper chain)

Sold.

My favorite bit about this one: the copper inclusions trapped inside the glass, coordinating with the antique Japanese copper chain.

The title is from Typographica’s type board for Rocky.

“As local as your fingertips”
(glass, silver)

Sold.

The title is from Stephen Dunn’s gorgeous poem, How to Be Happy: Another Memo to Myself

I love the perfect stripes of texture – it’s like a tornado bead, almost, marbled like the inside cover of an antique leatherbound book. Something strange and awesome about how the encasing glass melted in. Also, I love the bubbles and tiny dots of silver trapped inside the glass.

Other side:

“What we need is here”
(glass, silver)

This is more what the necklace ends up looking like:

The title is from Wendell Berry’s poem of same name.

“Dance before you are bidden”
(glass, silver)

Sold.

Other side:

Oh, prong settings are so much less annoying than bezel settings!

I may make similar pendants with more of my cabs, but hammered circles rather than twisted, and heavier wire.

I promptly named this one “Kissing & other Diversions” for Amal, who is an endless fount of inspiration.

Yeah, that’s one of my glass headpins on twisted, oxidized sterling silver wire, with another small glass bead and a Bali silver bead piled on top. And they’re all STARING AT YOU.

I finally tried making some earrings, already sold.

I love that purple.

Another pair, copper and dark aurora baleened around the glass.

“I loved you on purpose”
(glass, fine silver)

The title is from Ntozake Shange’s brilliant poem/play, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.

I spent November trying to be more productive about turning more of my glass work into finished pieces, largely in anticipation of a craft fair and art show I’ve reserved tables in over the next two months. This was my first batch of work from early November.

“Leshy”
(glass, silver bail, hand-dyed (not by me) silk ribbon finished with a sterling clasp and extension chain)

I bought that wavy bail to see how I felt about using such things. I like it here, and am inspired to create more of my own bigger bails for larger glass pieces.

This bead feels huge to me, so it really needed that big bail and big wide beautiful ribbon to stand up to it. Some little chain would never have managed.

Leshy are forest spirits in Russian folklore, lords of the forest, “sly as foxes and tricky as the wind” (as Josepha Sherman puts it in The Shining Falcon). They cavort and laugh and lead you astray through the wild twists of the woods.

“Shedding bricks like feathers”
(glass, silver)

Sold.

The title is from Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins.

That organic base is made by swirling silver lustre glass stringer over a sort of red and cream colored odd lot, which creates these amazing chemical reactions and brings out all those earthy tones.

Here’s how it hangs:

“The sea is not a safe place for unprotected morsels of protein”
(glass, copper)

Sold.

The title is from Steven Weinberg in his Dreams of a Final Theory.

Better view of the inner texture of some of those twisties:

Pushing myself means trying new techniques. Here’s one of the glass cabs I’ve been making on a ring! This was my first attempt at both bezel-setting and ring-making.

It’s a little tiny bit wobbly, though set tightly enough that it’s definitely not going to fall out – I think I just cut the bezel a bit too loosely. I gave it to my goddaughter, who doesn’t mind a bit of wobble and receiving a steady stream of not-quite-sellable jewelry as I work on learning new techniques.

“Reducing the infinite”
(glass, silver)

This is a bead from a few months ago, very much on the delicate end of the spectrum of my work.

“Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite. I could dilate, but refrain.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“We are here for problem-solving”
(glass, steel key, sterling silver jump ring, recycled sari silk ribbon)

Oh, and yes, the bead moves freely on the tiny antique skeleton key.

“We are here for problem-solving. Not to have problems out of the way in some stupid, sublime something called peace. We’re here strictly for problem-solving, and the better you get at it, the more problems you’re going to get to solve.” – R. Buckminster Fuller, Everything I Know

“A poem about everything”
(glass, brushed sterling silver bail, rubber cord with sterling silver clasp)

“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.” – Steven Wright