Rosary Bracelets

A recent lot of older jewelry I bought had a bunch of catholic charms and broken up rosaries.. So I made charm bracelets with them.  I added vintage wrapped pearls as well.   Also I wanted to share me wearing the sorting hat from Five Monkeys Inc Gallery.  Gryffindor, of course!!

Playing with the Camera Phone

I took this during my very last event in 2016, which was at Five Monkeys, Inc Gallery here in Des Moines.  It's the panorama setting on my Iphone - just goofing off.

It's amazing how far technology keeps going.  5 years ago you couldn't do this with a phone.... 10 years ago you maybe could do with a digital camera - a really fancy shmancy one.  Now you do it on your phone.  I have to wonder how camera sells are nowadays.. unless you are a really serious about photography, you just use your phone.   I imagine really high end ones are doing middlin' OK, but the mass consumer market has to be dead dead dead.

We have cut up a few old cameras in search of parts for jewelry, but most of them have very little in the way of moving parts... heck, the old box cameras are mostly air and mirrors.

And now it's all computer chips.

We bought a video camera back in 1996 with the birth of our child.  The thing had to weigh 10 lbs or more, and was the size of a Nike shoe box.

Now you can do more with your phone than we could with that video camera.

That old video camera BTW, got taken apart and recycled into jewelry a couple of years ago.

New Jury Photos

 Woo HOO! my new Jury photos came today, I'm soo excited and I think they turned out terrific!   So you know what I'll be doing this week.... working on shows for the summer.  I'm still going to stick to 10-15 range, but I think these photos really show how I've grown the last few years.  So fingers crossed they make an impression on the judges !   Most of these pieces are available at Five Monkeys Inc here in Des Moines, A few are on the gallery website even! I'll have them back to the store by Friday.

taxes, back ups and other boring business stuff....

I saw this back in August at a antique store and I still dream about it... over 7 ft of dreamy turn of the century storage... drooooollllll 

I can't say this week in the Jewelry biz is all that fun.  First off, in my "day" job I'm in training this week... training always seems to kill my desire to make stuff.  Since it's January I feel like it's OK to to take the week off, I'm hoping to get crackin' on a few projects this weekend.  I got a new tool (toy?) and I want to try it out and I've getting a craving to work chainmaile... I tend to ignore chainmaile and then every couple of months I just have to make it.  Or maybe I'll just keep reading books... I have a huge stack of paperbacks that I didn't have time to read over the summer.  The lovely thing about January is it's OK if I take a week off, it doesn't hurt anything.  I was amazing productive last week, so it all sort of balances out during the winter months.  

January is also the time of sales tax payments, end of year inventories, and making sure all my computer stuff is properly backed up.  I clean out my photo files and start up new ones for the year as well. job.  I like to sort my jewelry pics into some sort of order before I archive them.. that's actually tonight's job.

What sort of *fun*, once a year chores do you have?

Des Moines is KEWL!

I'm just cleaning up my file of photos from 2016 and ran across these --- believe it or not, this is wall art in downtown Des Moines, IA.

The 2 story, entire side of the building mural is fantastic, and this is just 2 little pieces of it.    Here's an article that tells some about this specific piece and several others in downtown Des Moines.  The article is a couple of years old, so I bet there is even more if you look.

Des Moines is a great city, you just have to look alittle harder for all the good stuff, and it's worth the effort!

So what does Kat do all Winter, since she doesn't have shows?

I found these vintage painted Cabs in Colorado on my family vacation last summer.. I immediately started working on a project using them and then... lost my artistic vision... 

Well I work a full time day job, so that of course.

Second, I clean my house.  OK, I clean slightly better than I do in the summer, because I have actual chunks of time, instead of 5 seconds here and there.  But that's not what I really want to do or talk about.  Ever.

So Winter is time to recharge batteries, acquire new skills, brush up old ones, work on new designs, investigate art shows and new gallery opportunities, source materials, reorganize one's studio or just simply put away things you didn't have time to put away since July, and maybe, just maybe, finish a couple of  UFO's.  (Unfinished Objects d'art)

Every artist has them... you start something, all enthusiastically, and somewhere you loose your creative energy, or you don't have exactly what you need, or just just don't have time to do it justice.   Or maybe it doesn't work right, and you just can't figure out what is next.

The plan is to put the Cab in this vintage locket that looks like a pocket watch.  The left shows the raw brass, and the right shows it after I've added some patina.

Somewhere on my back table  lies this project... I started to clean up and sort and put away stuff from a whole summer's worth of work, but I haven't run across this one yet, to make a "mock" pocket watch.  I have about 1 foot square of my back table that I haven't touched in months... I'm hoping to get to it this weekend.  It's about the last place this project could be.. but in some ways I'm not sure I want to find it.. I still am not sure how to finish it up.  Still, the cab calls to me, and I wish to do it justice.   I have a couple of other things that I just can't quite give up on, even though one of them I started over 2 years ago.  It periodically rises to the top of the pile, to be discarded once again as I just can't move forward on it.

Other things to think about this month: taxes, end of year paperwork, and getting new jury photos done.  I'm hoping to have them in the next 2 weeks and then it's going to be applying to art shows.  Jerry and I will be doing a reduced schedule again this year since last year it worked out so well.  I suspect actually this is the "new" normal.  ( isn't that just a terrible phrase? )   Doing 20 + shows a year is just frankly exhausting! Last year we did 12, and this year I'm thinking 10 at minimum, but no more than 15.  12 seems like a lovely number frankly.



 

Happy New Year!!!

I hope your 2017 is fab!