Reworking old designs and new materials
A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.Gertrude Jekyll
Apologies for my lack of posts, but I haven’t really had much to say. My work recently hasn’t really been that post-worthy and I’ve not had time or opportunity to take many photos.
But today was the first that felt like proper summer (we always have a nice spell in May, followed by a sudden drop in temperature in June and you wonder where it went) and I was able to work outside for some of the time and with the door open when inside. I always enjoy those work days the most – the open door adds more light and it’s always going to be a good thing to hear birds singing whilst you work. If you don’t mind passing traffic in between and the loudest birds being a very noisy brood of jackdaws nesting nearby, who are clearly perpetually hungry and don’t mind who knows it.
Whilst pottering outside I checked on some of my summer panting from last weekend and it always amazes me just how quickly new plants grow at this time of year, some are already visibly bigger within a week and it’s nice to see some colour.
A new flowering plant to me this summer is a double flowering Marguerite daisy – I got two, a bright pink one and a white one. Daisies do already have tiny florets at their centre, but these are significantly larger than I’ve seen before and are more than one colour too.
I’m delighted with them and hope that the slugs and snails will decide that they don’t taste very nice. I’m always a tad reluctant to introduce anything new, as sometimes they don’t last more than a day or two, if they find them especially yummy. I do always have a range of daisy-like flowers as they are very much a favourite and good at attracting hover flies, which I also love to see in the garden.
Recent work:
My work recently has been more about re-working designs and making things to order. I’ve not had as much time to work on brand new ideas as I’d like ideally. I do however have a pile of half finished pieces and new ones awaiting the attention of my camera, so I hope more new things will appear shortly.
I’ve enjoyed working in polymer clay recently – it has felt like an age since I gave it some time. Two new pieces are shown in the gallery below. The copper raindrops necklace was one of my earliest designs and I recently updated the design a little, in that I went larger and heavier with it, so make it a bit more substantial. I do find it disproportionately time-consuming to make for some reason (and this leads to the dilemma of pricing that’s both fair to the customer and myself), so I’m also looking at a more simplified version too.
The one brand new material and technique that I have tried is a faux laser cut wood for earrings and pendants. I used the Silhouette cutter to cut several layers of each design in a faux wood paper that I already had and I laminated them together carefully, by which time they become quite robust and rigid and I’ve then waxed the surface to improve their wearability. They do come out very light indeed, allowing the wearer the comfort to wear larger earrings than they might usually dare.
Gallery: