Three Fall Open Houses!

And the first one is a birthday party this Saturday!

What with a lot of travel, gardening, garden-related travel, and more this summer, it’s been way too long since I’ve invited folks over to my studio at the Wilkins School Community Center (WSCC) in Regent Square. But I’m eager to make up for that: I already have three free events lined up there in the next few weeks.

Saturday, Sept 23, 9 am to 1 pm (and beyond!)

• Everyone at WSCC is celebrating our building’s 90th birthday!
• Lots of groups and instructors are offering demos and free lessons in all the various rooms, rotating each hour, starting at 9 am, and ending at 1 pm.
• In my studio, I plan to offer a mix of brief demos and explanations of how I created various pieces, also from 9 to 1. (My very tentative schedule is at the "celebrating" link above.)
• I’ll also have lots of items for sale.
• At 1 pm, we’ll gather downstairs to offer a toast to the building, celebrate with cake, and explore its new mural!
• After that party, I’ll head back upstairs for about another hour, to try to get my demo table back to a space I can work on next week. If you can’t get here before 1, this will be another time for you to come and shop. As long as folks are around and interested, I can stay open until about 3.

Saturday, Oct 14, 4 to 6:30 pm

• The Regent Square Civic Association’s (RSCA) inaugural Second Saturday in the Square kicks of at WSCC that afternoon!
• Food trucks, craft beer, live music, children’s activities, and more!
• So of course, I’ll open my studio for another show then!
• The RSCA’s event actually runs from 4 to 7 pm. Due to prior commitments both before and after that time, it’s going to be a challenge for me to fit this in. But I will!!! I’ll likely arrive right at 4, and will have to leave no later than 6:30. So please be sure to catch me while I am there that day.

Satuday, Nov 11, 10 am to 4 pm

• The delightful Indie Knit and Spin (IKS) will be back at WSCC!
• I’m not an official IKS vendor: my studio just happens to be right in the middle of their wonderful show, so I’ll have my “shop” open then too.
• Sometimes, but not always, I offer button-making workshops at IKS. I’m not doing that with this one, but I will offer two (one each in silver and bronze) at the North Hills Art Center in October. If you’re interested, please sign up for one or both of those!

If you can’t make it to one of the above three events, just get in touch and let’s arrange another time that will work for both of us!

(I just realized the photo I added to this post
shows my studio from over three years ago:
I need to get a more up-to-date one!)

NHAC 2017 Fall Members Show

I’m delighted to report that I have three pieces in the current Members Show at the North Hills Art Center! The pieces were hung as they were accepted last week, but the official “opening” of the show is Saturday, September 9, from 7 to 9 pm, and runs through October 6.

As usual for NHAC, the majority of the entries are paintings. But when I dropped off my art jewelry, I did see fiber art, pottery, mixed media assemblages, and more too! A lot of the pieces were made by students of the center so, if you’re curious about that, this show can also give you an idea of what you might be able to learn in the classes there. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll stop by to check it out! It would, of course, be great to see you at the opening on Saturday but, if you can’t make it then, do go whenever you can.

I’ve already said a few things about each of my entries, separately, in earlier blog or Facebook posts, but I thought I’d assemble a few thoughts on each of them together here. They are all available for purchase at the show.

GWV!

If you look closely, you may notice that the flowers in this “rose bronze” bracelet are Green (nephrite jade), White (cubic zirconia), and Violet (amethyst). Embellishments in those colors were a code in Edwardian / Art Nouveau times for Give Women the Vote!

This piece was made before either of my other two in this show, but since then I’ve been holding on to it myself. This is the first time I’ve ever really considered putting it up for sale!

Night Moon

As one of the earlier pieces I made with EZ960 after its introduction in 2016, this was made as a class sample, to illustrate the draping/folding process. But it’s notable to me because it’s the first piece I made using only “scraps” from earlier projects. Obviously, that test was successful!

In draping, sometimes the material tells me the shape it wants to form, and that was definitely the case here! The title of Night Moon comes from how, once the piece was completely finished, it suddenly struck me how much it evoked thoughts of a particular night in June of 1988 (a truly wonderful summer!), when I was climbing (well, at that point, descending) Emeishan, one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains in China.

Keystone Wildflower

Yes, this is yet another piece from my Urban Flowers series! Like the earlier ones, this pendant was made using sterling (.960) silver for most of the piece, for strength, and in a separate step the dichroic glass cabochon was attached with fine (.999) silver because that form plays better with glass. It hangs on a sterling (.925) silver chain.

The dichro in this piece is a cabochon made by local glass artist, Elise McVeigh. It is also one of the priciest pieces I’ve had in a show in a good while: that is because, at something like 75 mm across, it is one of the largest pieces I’ve made in a good while too! And big uses a lot of silver, so the price simply reflects that. But Elise’s lovely glass is noticeably different from the other dichro cabs I’ve added to my earlier urban flowers, and I just thought it deserved to go into a “statement” piece! I hope it will find a new home with someone who agrees with me.

2017 Arts on the Riverwalk – please vote!

UPDATE: Voting ended at 5 pm on September 9. I didn’t mount quite a big enough Facebook campaign (which really isn’t my style anyway) to claim the $100 people’s choice prize but, as of the last time I was able to check (an hour-ish before the deadline), I had garnered well within the top 10% of votes. So I sure do appreciate the support of everyone who took the time to enter a like-vote on my behalf!

(Also, since it no longer matters, I’ve removed the column of notes on the extra quirks of this particular voting process…. The rest of this post remains as originally written.)

Oh, and the exhibit remains on display at The Confluence cafe through October 26.

I’ve got two pieces in the Arts on the Riverwalk competition, and I’d sure appreciate your vote!

Now, I’ll admit, neither of these pieces were originally made with competition in mind… They were designed as samples for two different classes I taught last fall, and my intention was to illustrate specific technical strategies of construction! In my classes, I also point out that sometimes a design will take a while to tell me what it really wants to be; in the case of these two, they have also taken a while to tell me what they want to be called!

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1. In the pair shown here, the piece positioned towards the left, with a silver pendant on a gunmetal chain, is now titled Overflowing Nest. In the class where I taught that, we covered a range of different “nest-style” constructions, plus I threw in a “bonus” on making links. Time constraints meant I could only illustrate using links this way, as a bail, but the same techniques work for making an entire chain. The other interesting thing about this piece is that it was made for one of the first classes I taught using “EZ960” sterling silver metal clay, and it was made entirely from reconstituted “scraps” that were left over from earlier samples. It’s always good to learn how well different clays do or do not reconstitute, and this sample worked wonderfully.

If you’d like to vote for my “Overflowing Nest” piece, please click to find the instructions here.

(Quick mini-lesson on re-use: Like all clays, scraps can get “worn out” after many re-uses. After just a few repeats, if you’ve treated your clay nicely all along, it’ll be fine. But even after it’s had a long or rough time, it can still be salvaged by mixing little bits of “scrap” in with “fresh” clay! This is one of the things I really appreciate about most metal clays!)

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2. The piece towards the right, with a bronze pendant on a brass chain, is now called At a Bend in the River. That main part of this one was also made from a scrap! I’d finished the main demonstration on making a rolled bail on a two-sided piece, but there was a question, so I quickly rolled out another piece of clay to use as an illustration while answering. I was a bit distracted while talking about something raised by yet another student, so I didn’t roll it very straight AND I rolled off the edge of one of the texture sheets with clay squishing out. But I looked at it and exclaimed, “What great luck! This piece just told me how it wants to be built!”

I immediately reversed my plan of which side would be the back or the front, because the place where I’d overshot the texture has that lovely angle-into-smooth look that I just had to put on the outside-front, not tucked under in the back. Since the remaining demonstrations I had planned involved layering elements and how to add a fire-able stone (in this case, a peridot-colored cubic zirconia), I made use of the curve of the piece to embellish it with a piece where I could also talk about design issues for centering, or not centering, any embellishments. Ended up being a very interesting, if unplanned, answer to the original question!

If you’d like to vote for my “At a Bend in the River” piece, please click to find the instructions here.

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Also, though I don’t have these specific classes scheduled (yet) for this fall in either of my North Hills or South Hills venues, there’s still time to add a workshop or two in my East End studio. So if you’ve been inspired enough by one (or both) of these to want to learn how to make something like that yourself, please let me know and we can talk about our options!

More on other shows, classes, and more, as soon as I find the time for another chance to post here.