six steps

Six steps to an utterly useless shower when you are late for an important appointment:

1. Make sure it slips your mind that you found the terrier sleeping on the only clean bath towel the night before.

2. Upon exiting the shower look all over the house  and confirm that this is the only available towel. I find profanity helpful during this step.

3. Return to the bathroom, close your eyes and dry yourself with the Terrier Towel, breathing forcefully OUT of your mouth - do not inhale!

4. Gaze into the mirror and enjoy your new sexy, fleecy look.

5. Attempt to air-dry any residual moisture so that some of the fur falls off on it's own. If you are really late, move to using paper towels before you are completely dry. As in step 2 profanity can help.

6. When you arrive late for your appointment, take the time to check your look in the restroom and swat away the three white hairs that remain on your neck.

Listen to a woman with experience - don't skip step 6! 
 
On a positive note, I delivered my rings to The National Ornamental Metal Museum today for my small exhibition that opens next week! I'm so excited!

a bracelet for Nina Garcia

Pierced brass cuff with variscite stone that I cut and polished.

Made for the EtsyMetal Project Runway Jewelry Challenge. For this week's episode the designers were challenged to create an outfit for Nina Garcia, the winning design will be worn by Nina and featured in Marie Claire magazine. Nina prefers a smooth and crisp silhouette, she generally wears tailored clothes without too much embellishment or excess fabric. I searched around the web and she seems to like chunky jewelry - she wears a lot of cuffs (sometimes one on each arm), and she likes to wear them on her upper forearm as well, which I find striking.


I love the winning design from this week's show, created by Kimberly Goldson, and I made a cuff in my style that coordinates with the outfit. Kimberly's gold, textured top has many sharp details and makes such a statement that a big and bold bracelet seems all that's needed to set it off and balance the asymmetry.

(I made the bracelet closer to Nina's size than my own.)

Kimberly's winning outfit plus my bracelet. I hope I don't get sued for using this image, I couldn't help myself. At any rate the cuff is not for sale - unless Nina wants it!

my bucket list

Today I'm blogging with some friends about our respective "bucket lists" - the things we'd like to do before we die. I've been thinking about this for two damn days and here it is:

one chin-up

That's it, that's all I've come up. I've had this goal for a long time and have worked at it sporadically over the last seven years. The older I get the harder it is and it may never happen. I can live with that.

Sure, there are lots of things I'd like to do - travel to Bangkok, see the Northern Lights, go rockhunting for aquamarine. But these things are fairly arbitrary and after all of my contemplation I realized that my mind just doesn't work this way. I can't settle on a bucket list and I don't really want a bucket list. I'd like to say that's because I live in the moment, but if that were true I think I would be content all the time. Maybe I don't like thinking about my own mortality, maybe a list would cause me undue pressure - at any rate my mind won't cooperate and I learned a long time ago not to argue with it.

So there it is, a chin-up. I hope you don't feel cheated by this post, I suggest that you visit the blogs of my friends to read about their much more interesting lists:

Andes Cruz
Kathleen Krucoff
Wendy Kelly
Natsuko Hanks
Mary Watson

20/52 Agate

Made for EtsyMetal's Project Runway "Go Big or Go Home" Challenge. I carved the agate from a slab using my trim saw, hand tools, and sandpaper and then I set it in copper.

more rocks

A milky light blue marquise aquamarine that I cut (1 1/8" long) plus over 100 cts of gorgeous green beryl rough (these two are the same mineral, just different colors). The green beryl is amazing and I won't be cutting into it until I'm much, much better at it.

what I've been doing part II

Things have been busy. I'm still behind with my RAW rings and clearly I have given up on my original intent to feature rings by other artists each and every day (I'm sorry).

I thought I'd share some of the other projects I've been working on. I recently finished teaching two eight week photography courses at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art to adolescents from Girls Inc, we focused on portraiture and the girls will have an exhibition of their work at the museum in September.

The girls also did some fun things with stop motion.

Last I month volunteered to teach a couple of juggling workshops to kids at a local community center. I made the balls very cheaply this way and gave a set to each child who successfully learned to juggle three balls within the hour. All but 5 kids out of 30 or so were able to do it, and the youngest to learn is eight. So much for what many think about children's attention spans, most adults I know won't stick with it that long.

I made a video on how to juggle three and four balls for some of my friends, it's also on YouTube (and displays correctly) here:

In June I finally finished the mosaic tile project created with the students in the courtyard of Treadwell Middle school.

I have been making liqueurs - pictured are blackberry, ginger, apricot, and orange pecan. I also made some great chocolate rum, peach, and plum but my favorite turned out to be Jalpeno/espresso tequila sweetened with agave. Really. Yum.


I have also been learning to cut finished stones from crystals and hunks of rock, below are clay canyon variscite, aquamarine, pink tourmaline, ruby, amethyst, carnelian, yellow apatite, and pink quartz.


They used to look something like this:

and I cut them on this:

And I put together a 20 page book of some of my Ring a Day pieces using Snapfish, a number of us who participated in that project are creating books and trading with each other.



Back in June I made this entry for Wendy Rosen's video contest to support handmade in the National Parks. I may have been the only entrant and I'm not sure if a winner has been announced. It's 5.5 minutes long. (Bad audio - turn it up!)

(Now don't forget to lower the volume or you might end up blasted out of your chair.)

Lastly, the press release for my upcoming ring exhibition at the National Ornamental Metal Museum came out today! The show will be open from September 1 - December 1. YAY!