More Handmade Hammered Chains & Some Tiny Hearts...

I got a little further on the Vertebrae Chain...

...and then hammered out a few shapes in 20 gauge wire, played with them in different positions, hammered and tweaked some more, and came up with these chain styles. All are about 8 inches long so far. The middle chain is a simple figure 8 chain, then I made the lower figure 8 chain more "8-ish" with a large and small loop. I added the filigrees based on the vertebrae links above; instead of hammering them while straight, I curved and spiraled them to the outside.

For me, the hearts are easier to make if first you loosely spiral both ends towards each other, then bend the wire in the middle until the spirals meet, rather than bending the wire in a V-shape first and then trying to make the curls. After I make a pile of them, I gently hammer the outside curves.

These hearts are about 1/2 an inch across and I'll be adding tiny pearl drops and sterling leverback earwires in time for the market tomorrow morning. Yeppers... It's Valentine's Day again and I am NOT READY. Oh, well... there's always next year, and the year after, right? But I do have lots of great gifts for everyone, including kids. Come and check out the Woodstock Farmers Market on Nellis Street, 7:00 a.m. 'til 12:00 noon.

Thanks for stopping by!

Rules for "Furniture Arranging", Decluttering -- Yeah, ME! -- & Some New Copper Chain Components...

I put "furniture arranging" in quotes because people who know me know that I belong to the "it lives where it drops" school of interior design. This applies to the room, the table or shelf of stuff, the clothes, the jewellery, everything in my life: for me, it's all one undifferentiated messpile. Constantly reading decluttering websites 'til the cows come home just doesn't do it for me.

However. Now that I am a one-third proprietor of a booth at the One of a Kind Antique Mall where the goal is to make OUR hundreds of tiny items leap out from the mind-numbing millions of items in the whole 80,000 square foot mall, thereby capturing the eye, mind and heart of their future owners in the three seconds or so allotted to us as they walk by our booth, I'm being forced to learn valuable lessons, if not about interior design or our taste in acquiring gotta-have-this items, then at the very least about how to turn mind-numbing clutter and junk into semi-organised collections -- not chaos -- that will result in constant sales and turnover. (And that is one brain-numbing long sentence. At least, I think it was a sentence. Sorry about that.)

Prior to this, as Lynn and Nancy Mac valiantly attempted to organise thousands of beads, as well as my market table, for me over the past two or three years, I wondered how on earth people did it: make a pile of junky and/or disparate things look clear and ordered. At what point does sick-making clutter of anything veer off the hoarding track onto an "Oh, wow! Look at that!" collection of reeeally cool stuff track?

Here are my short and sweet rules for the store/booth, where the rule is more is way merrier:

1. Gather together like items by picking a theme: colour, era, purpose...
2. Pick the focal piece for that particular vignette
3. Group like vignettes into a larger, overarching theme
4. Can't tell if it's working or not? Photograph your vignette, then step back and photograph the area it occupies: what's not working will leap out at you (this works for anything)

At home, where the rule is less and less is more:
1. Ruthlessly cull or regift (consignment or friends, thrift store, dump) then cull the cull: if you're weak-willed/lazy (I'm both), ask your friends to take everything away immediately for you. Boxes of stuff sitting in a corner are still STUFF IN YOUR HOUSE.
2. Enforce the rule: if something comes in, something goes out (furniture, junque, clothes...)

To the "at home" advice, I finally found out where the recycling depot hides here: I'm talking boxes and boxes of papers to get rid of that would fry any shredder's circuits: outdated and often unread magazines, old computer printouts, university papers that after 20 years I. will. never. look. at. again. Then there are the boxes and boxes of art books hiding out of sight, out of mind under my bed, about 20 of those at last count -- that's boxes, not books.

I think I'm finally starting to get the idea: despite adding a largish side table/magazine table and a box more of stuff to the booth yesterday, after we were finished moving stuff around Nancy Mac said in gobsmacked wonder, "Look at all the room we have!"

June 30

July 6

July 9

It may well be my imagination, but the booth really does feel roomier in the July 9th picture. Even though we've added more items and increased the space the island in the middle occupies, turning the display table 90 degrees really helped with that. The wrought iron screen gives us a see-through wall halfway along the length of that display table and things can pile up and against it on both sides. Overall, there's still plenty of room in behind for people to walk. The new deep green table against the blue seems to calm that whole wall down and rests the eye: there's not that bouncing between the teal blue wall and green as there was with the lighter wooden cart that can be seen in the July 6th picture. The lighter-coloured and lower cart being in the left corner also guides the eye down from the right corner to the left, yet you can still take everything in. 

Yes, there is an estate sale happening this weekend with our name on it!

Meanwhile, after roaming Pinterest and scouring it for ideas, I finally settled down to watch Hannibal on Netflix and bend copper wire. Tonight: hammering. 

These are the tools I use to make these items. I buy all my copper wire by the pound from The Ring Lord. I think this is 16 gauge. I use memory wire cutters on the heavier gauge wire, because it cuts it more easily, and gives a good squared off cut rather than the angled and picky/burred cut that the regular flush cutters give, the ends of which must be filed. For what I'm doing here, a single loop and little to no wrapping, I don't want an angled cut anyway. I want that blunt cut end to butt right into the wire it's looped around to.

I used the barrel of the orange highlighter pen to make the larger loop of the figure-8 pieces at the top (about 15mm diameter), and then the largest part of the round nose to make the smaller loop.

Next step will be a marathon of hammering and then, after a good swish in ketchup to make everything shiny, assembling them into bracelets, earrings and necklaces. One of these days I'll have to play with liver of sulphur to patina my chains, but so far people here seem to prefer the look of shiny copper.

Thanks for looking!

My Heart is Pounding...

Whoo hoo! What a rush!!!

What happened? I booked my hotel for The Gem Expo in November. Yeah, I know, I know, I don't get out much. THREEEEEE nights!!!!!!!!!! Be still, oh beating heart.

The Strathcona on York Street. I get the cheapest room possible, and it's verrrrry small, but I'm only sleeping there, right? Next to the elevator shaft, still, it's quiet enough. I think it used to be a utility/housekeeping room. In fact, the room is smaller than the freight elevator at the Hyatt Regency where the show is. But who cares, right? It's super cheap for right downtown, and you can't beat the location: across the street from the Royal York and the train station, a mere six or seven block walk from the Hyatt, and their pub grub is super-good and not so terribly expensive with an open kitchen just as you hit the bottom of the stairs. To me, open kitchens rule. I was talking about the Strath Pub a while back with my sister the Toronto health inspector and she was saying that all the pubs in Toronto have had to really up the quality of their food in order to keep patrons coming. All the meals I had there in July were just great -- and the Alexander Keith's on tap was icy cold. That's all I care about -- good food and cold beer.

Just got some typing in, so I gotta get at that shortly. I was making chain jewellery all last night (I'd used up all my Internet bandwidth for the month, but had finished watching Dexter anyway) and this morning, finally finished one long necklace off. I was in the midst of stringing another necklace with handmade zinc and hammered tinned copper dangles when the typing arrived. I'll post the finished jewellery later tonight, but here's a sneak peek. The preponderance of pink is only because someone wants a pink seed bead bracelet with a hot pink enamel breast cancer ribbon charm, so I figured I'd make a bunch of chains with different pinks to see what they'll look like, one thing leading to another, and this long two-strand necklace was the result. Plus there was this long neglected but lovely string of blue chalcedony from Nelson Gemstones that has been popping up for at least a year whenever I reach for something -- pick me! pick me! -- so I finally broke the string up and committed myself.

Those dark blue beads are anyone's guess. Dyed something or other, probably quartz, and super cheap, but holy moley, do they look nice, kind of a cross between blueberries and lapis lazuli, if lapis were translucent. The two sizes of pink and peachish beads came out of the same bargain bin at Robert Hall Originals (who will be in Ancaster on September 27, 28, 29, as well as at the Grand River Bead Society show October 5th & 6th). The light blue beads are the 8mm blue chalcedony from Joanne at Nelson Gemstones. 

There's a part of me that wouldn't mind moving back to Toronto -- the 6 a.m. to 2:30 pm part of me, if that makes any sense. But once rush hour hits, not to mention the much cheaper rents, I'm just as happy to be living out here in the sticks... for now, at any rate. But man, oh, man, it's nice to be there during the show, at least until I have to get into my truck to go anywhere and taking 20 minutes to drive five blocks...

BTW, does anyone recognise this little guy? He and his zillions of brothers and sisters are just over an inch long, extremely fuzzy and considerably whiter than this one looks in the picture and motors around quite quickly. No idea what he'll become in the spring. I don't remember seeing quite as many of these other years. 

Thanks for looking!