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