The First Friday Finds of Summer...or Something

So it's Saturday and time for the Friday Finds, since I wasn't home to do them last night. Instead, I was over at a friend's house, watching the movie Cursed, which was actually pretty enjoyable and fun. :) I'm not a big fan of Christina Ricci, but she did a good job, and it was a good-natured sort of tribute to werewolf (and other monster) movies.

The search for the mystery green stone continues. I found some yellow serpentine that resembles it, but only a few images that come close, and no other serpentine images fit at all.

Our first find is for my blogging buddy Rachel's site. I've known Rachel for about 2.5 years now, and she has always struck me as very conscientious and caring and very respectful of the world. I love her and am more than happy to link her clothing and accessories site, Sea of Stars Designs. I especially like the "Nature" pillowcase. :)

When I was a wee tyke, the one and only sugary cereal my mom ever let me have, and then only periodically and for a limited period of time somewhere between the ages of 3 and 6, was Quisp. You can not find Quisp anymore...unless you know where to look, and I am happy to do my homework for those of you who know the sugary corn goodness of (pre-Cap'n Crunch) Quisp as well as I do: The Hard to Find Grocer's cereal aisle. And the best part is that it won't cost you a cent more than it would at the actual grocery store. The Hard to Find Grocer has comparable prices.

Kitson shoppers, get real. If you're a Hollywoulder seeking status, Lisa Rinna's store, Belle Gray is the way to go. Seriously, Rinna has a good eye and is waaaay more in the fashion know than ANYTHING the horror that is Kitson will ever be, AND she offers personal shoppers. Not to mention fresh flowers, cookies, and a happy, girly atmosphere. If you're looking for a trendy boutique, I say spend your cash at one of Belle Gray's two Valley locations. I like her attitude and especially love she didn't feel the need to locate her stores in trendy Beverly Hills; the fact that Belle Gray urges you to support an Asian disaster relief cause is just icing on the cake. Now if only La Rinna would fall in love with some of my (Waterlily) jewelry and offer to carry it at a gorgeously high price, life would be grand; I could do a lot worse than for Lisa Rinna to wear my stuff in public. :) Alas, I continue to labor in obscurity...someday. Someday. :)

Finally. Just what the world needs: a teeny, tiny, utterly useless rubber "rain shoe" for $125. That's reality.

These are ridiculously expensive, and I can't help it, I want one.

All right, my cheeky little squirrels, I am off to make more jewelry (I finally got the ring thing!) and study for my driver's license exam. I also have the joy of inventory to do for the Waterlily stuff I've got ready to go, and taxes to prepare...meh.

Enjoy the "first weekend" of summer!

Jenie

I Hate Wire

ARGH!!! I love those wirewrap rings that are growing ever more popular, so tonight I figured I'd make some. The first one came out bee-yoo-tee-fully. All the others?

Crap. :(

I don't get it. They look so deceptively simple. Everything I looked up when I proved to be utterly ring remedial looks simple. I am doing it the right way, but for some reason, I just can't do it correctly to save my life. Copper is fairly easy, but silver? Silver sucks. And you know why? Because it's an expensive learning medium. That's why.

::sigh::

Jenie

Beatrix

Can I get a drumroll, please.

At long last, the much-awaited photo of the Beatrix necklace has been taken, polished, and posted. And there's no way it's going to live up to the fanfare, now, but here it is. :)



The larger image is of me (my neck, anyway) wearing one, but I'm going to retake it with something else as soon as I can. The picture looks goofy, but it was the only photo I took that really got the necklace across. I could seem to arrange it adequately on anything else. Also, it occurs to me that this image makes it look like a 3-strand necklace, which it isn't, but I thought one looked kind of boring. Now that I'm thinking about it, I suppose I need to retake the photo(s). Alas. Well, there it is for now, anyway.

More later.

J

Tip For the Day

Do not open the lid on a bottle of glue (especially toxic silicone-based) with your mouth. Sure, you may have done so without mishap in the past, and yes, I realize you may have both hands full, one holding the bottle, and the other holding the thing to be glued. But trust me: on a hot day, where some heat and pressure may have built up inside the squeeze bottle, this is not a good plan.

It really, really isn't.

Jenie

Kaya Carnelian & Suede Lariat

My entire day was photography, and I still can't photograph gold to save my life. Alas.

No Beatrix yet. Should get to it tomorrow.

A new large picture for Gina, and I don't like it any more than the one that was there. Why, oh why, why, why can't I photograph gold???

Finally got pictures I like of that rose quartz necklace I mentioned yesterday, but now I have to figure out my cost on it again, I made it so long ago. So it's not up yet. However, I got some pretty decent shots of a new carnelian and suede lariat, which I love. I like carnelian a lot, so I bought these rather large carnelian nuggets from a new supplier, thinking I'd make pendants out of 'em. When I took the strand apart, I found the holes were really large...large enough in most cases to put a strand of soft suede through, or a thin leather cord. The suede looks better, and one of my suppliers carries it in the perfect matching color, sort of a cross between rust and burnt orange (not as vibrant as the photo), so I experimented with a long length of it, and it makes a really neat lariat. I totally love it. The carnelian has got lots of neat crisscrossing surface "cracks", and some of the pieces have great white quartz patches or streaks...it's seriously just really neat. Unfortunately, a lot of pieces have iron blemishes, which I don't particularly care for, but they certainly lend a lot of character to the pieces, and I just won't use the ones with too much of it. Most only have one or two small rough spots that can be turned to the back, and the rest of the stone looks great. I really dig these. At any rate, here's what the necklace (called Kaya) looks like:



It would also look good on a dusty olive or brown suede.

And now, my fingers are cramping and my wrist hurts. Time for bed.

Good night,
Jenie

3 New Pairs of Earrings

So, I got three new sets of earrings photographed and reasonably well-edited, though the color on Gina was really hard to get down. Gold is apparently difficult to photograph, because I've had trouble getting the right color on the monitor every time. With better lights (read: true white light, instead of incandescent yellow bulbs), I could probably get a more true color, but what I have causes all my photos to come out with a reddish tint, and getting the right color on screen can be difficult. Especially with gold.

At any rate, here they are:

These turquoise earrings have a Choctaw Indian name meaning leaping water. They're not named for Tallulah Bankhead, but when I came across the name Tallulah while looking for a native American girl's name having to do with water, I got curious and looked up her biography. (I always thought Tallulah was a British name; silly me!) She was named for her grandmother, who was in turn named for a town in Georgia called Tallulah Falls, so I guess indirectly, Ms. Bankhead was named after the Choctaw leaping water. :)

Now, these 14k gold-filled oval earrings are named for a movie star! For some reason, while I was making them last night and then photographing them today, I kept thinking of Gina Lollobrigida every time I wondered what to name them. So Gina they are. :) They remind me of tan, sexy socialites hanging out in the sun on the Riviera, with copies of Vogue and Elle and tall dark cabana boys to replenish their frozen daquairis. (Obviously I read way too many books as a child and am hopelessly addicted to 60's movies.) They look heavy but are surprisingly very light, which is awesome, and each oval link is free-floating, with a hammered-looking texture. They're also available in stering silver. Say it with me now, "Ooo! Aaaaah!" ;)

And finally, we have these African turquoise jasper earrings named Nia. Nia is Swahili and means purpose. The cubes are about a centimeter on a side, and the little "tassles" are made up of five 1" lengths of delicate sterling silver chain. They look an awful lot like turquoise but are really jasper, a harder, more durable stone. The pair pictured are of dark blue-green stone, but about half of what I have are also in a softer, more aqua color. They all have the black matrix and spots or streaks of ochre.

I like the Gina earrings a lot, but I think my favorites of the 3 are the Nia. They're nice and small, but swingy and feminine. And they feel neat brushing against my neck every now and again. I ought to send Nia Peeples a pair; from what I've read about her, the name suits her. :)

So there you have it. 3 pairs of earrings. I am going to make some pseudo-chandeliers tomorrow and may actually have the strength to try photographing the Beatrix...today's big wrestle was with this rose quartz necklace with a faceted mother of pearl pendant that I have had for forever and tried to photograph several times, to know avail. Either the camera eats it, I somehow manage to lose the photos, or everything comes out blurry, every time I try. This time I got one for the larger, alternative image (I think), but I still have to get a shot of it for the thumbnails and product image. ::sigh::

And that's all I've got for now. Hope your weekend is going well. :)

Jenie

Rhyolite, Obsidian & the Friday Finds

Ah, the joys of discovering a new rock. I had a custom order necklace and earrings to make this week, and since the supplier who gives me volume discount does not carry 5mm Swarovski rounds in AB, I had to go to the more expensive retailer I used to frequent. This was actually good, because they carry stones and cuts the other guy doesn't, and I picked up the African turquoise jasper I wrote about the other night, as well as some really nice rhyolite. I didn't know what rhyolite was (I don't know much about rhyolite, but I know what I like...), so that necessitated a very looooong search on the web. Which turned up a lot about the ghost town called Rhyolite in the Nevada desert, but ghost towns were not what I was after. I found a lot of pretty vague sites about rhyolite, but none of the definitive sites I know I can trust had anything about it. I was, however, able to cobble together the following:

Rhyolite is an igneous rock extremely similar to granite. It's formed when magma is expelled pretty violently from a volcano and then cools quickly in open air. Because of it's high silicon content, rhyolite is a very smooth stone with a glasslike sheen and very tiny crystalline structure, composed of feldspar, quartz, mica, and whatever other minerals may have been present at the time of the eruption. (If the eruption which produces rhyolite is violent enough and a lot of air mixes in with the magma, you end up with pumice.) Rhyolite has a hardness of 6 and is found in shades of white, grey, green, pink/red, purple, yellow and brown. It may be banded or contain swirling layers of different color and texture, or crystals of quartz, feldspar, mica or hornblende. Green rhyolite is often referred to somewhat erroneously as rainforest "jasper". (it is not a jasper)

The search for information on rhyolite (and believe me, digging up the Mohs on it took some serious surfing), led to the 411 on another igneous "rock," obsidian. Like rhyolite, obsidian has a very high silicon content. Containing at least 70% silicon, obsidian is actually a natural glass, and it too is produced by rapidly cooling lava - even more rapidly cooling than rhyolite - and generally lava which has hit sea water. Obsidian lacks crystalline structure and is not considered a true mineral, but it has a Mohs hardness of 5 - 5.5 and is often used for ornamental purposes, as well as in cardiac surgery; blades crafted from obsidian have a much sharper edge than those of surgical steel and result in less trauma to the heart tissue. While most people think black when they think of obsidian, obsidian often appears grey when cut at a specific angle and is also found in smokey grey/brown or dark green. Small bubbles of air trapped inside the glass can also lend a sheen of gold, green, purple, "rainbow", silver or red. Some obsidian also contains white inclusions resembling snowflakes. Perhaps the most treasured form of obsidian is that of naturally rounded pebbles called "Apache Tears." These nuggets have "windows" through which one can look and see what appears to be a tiny tear suspended inside. Native American legend has it each tiny inclusion was shed by an Apache woman to mourn warriors driven over an Arizone cliff by the US cavalry during the late 1800's. Where each tear struck the ground, it was turned to stone, and natural Apache Tear nuggets are given now as a token of good luck.

And now, the Friday Finds. :)

The Fens is a painting done by a blogging buddy of mine named Amy. Her art "blog" is located here. I also like the painting entitled "Archetypal Provence". It totally reminds me of standing in a field of sunflowers driving back to Paris from Axe-les-Thermes summer of 2003. Man, I miss France.

If you go to this page, you can see a picture of the Roman thermal bath at Ax. In fact, if you look at this picture of the bath, you can see where I sat and put my feet in after hiking about 2km nearly straight up the side of a mountain and another 3 or so more up a road to the finishing stage of one of the legs of the Tour de France (and then all the way back down again!). I was sitting about 4 - 5 feet away from the upper right corner of the bath. Which is not quite in the middle of the righthand side, there. Man, that picture really takes me back. That was a great night. All these people had come into town or were staying at hotels there for the Tour, and a bunch of us were seated around the bath, with our feet in the water. It was a nice cool night, so the water felt *great*. Everyone was talking pretty quietly but happily, and there was some laughing. We just sat and listened to people talk and talked a little ourselves and watched the kids play. After that, me and Marie-Pierre walked through Ax, which is a small little medieval town, and then went back to the car and drove back to her parents' chateau just a little bit outside town. The chateau is really more of a chalet, I guess, in the traditional sense of the word, all A-frame and wood, with narrow stairs going to the upper floor and great wooden doors...just an awesome place. I loved it.

Here's the official website of Ax les Thermes, in translated english. The Photos page has some great pictures.

Here's the site in it's normal French, for those of you who speak French.

I can't remember if I posted this or not, but here's the link to my brother Tom Womack's WWII history book about the Dutch Naval Air Force's contribution to the war against Japan. He taught himself Dutch when he was like 19 so that he could converse with other Dutch writers and historians. He's a pretty smart guy. :)

And this is a link to my friend Jodie's book. Jodie is quite the accomplished and very cool human being. I miss her a lot since she had to go and move to Atlanta. You can read a little about Jodie and why she wrote the book here.

And last, if you ever need to figure out how to repair a Native American flute (don't laugh; it could happen), this page might prove helpful.

Sorry no fashion finds this week. I haven't had time to scout any out.

bis spater, gator!

Jenie

African "Turquoise" Jasper

I bought some very nice African "turquoise" beads today. I knew they weren't really turquoise, on accounta I read a lot and all, but I couldn't remember what they really are and did a search to find out. I'm happy to say I got the actual substance right (jasper!), but I am less than happy to find that a HUGE number of people out there on the web are selling jewelry made with African "turquoise" as being actual, legitimate turquoise. It is not. Please do not pay turquoise prices for it or buy jewelry thinking you're getting turquoise when you are not.

As the title of this entry should tell you, African "turquoise" is actually a very common rock - jasper - and is completely unrelated to the stone it is often misrepresented as being. My Google search for "african turquoise" turned up 9,760 sites selling jasper beads, jewelry, or other ornamentation, and of those, easily 90% or more of the links I clicked misrepresented the stone as real turquoise, either out of mistaken belief that it is, or because they're trying to capitalize and make money fraudulently off of the name. It would not be nice of me to assume which, but I will say that I educate myself as well as possible on every stone I use in my jewelry, and I feel it is up to a seller to know and understand what one is selling and honestly disclose that to the buyer. A search for "african turquoise jasper" turned up a mere 2 pages of finds, and of those, at least 2 sites were there because of the proximity of the words "african turquoise" to the word jasper, not because the stone was fairly identified. In fact, they did not appropriately identify the stone as actually being jasper. Jasper is a member of the quartz group and ranges from 6.5 to 7 on the Mohs scale, making it a somewhat sturdier rock than turquoise, but it is still far less expensive, and while african turquoise jasper is an acceptable substitute for actual turquoise if all you are concerned with is appearance, the difference in stones should certainly be reflected in a much lower price for jasper.

All of that being said, I will have both stabilized turquoise and african turquoise jasper earrings available as soon as I can get their photos ready. In the meantime, if you'd like to read more about jasper, please see this GemRocks jasper page, and to read more about semi-precious stones in general, see the Dragonfly semi-precious stone page, which I constantly update in an effort to educate the jewelry-buying public. I just posted a lot about turquoise a few days ago, along with descriptions of faustite and apple-green or green apple turquoise.

Ciao for now,
Jenie

Selkie Abalone & Suede Necklace

So, in keeping with my sudden photography incapability, I took something like 50 photos, none of which I really like, and got 3 for the website of this suede and abalone shell necklace:



It's named Selkie, after the mythological seal-fairies of Celtic folklore said to live off of the islands of Orkney and Shetland. Female selkies had the natural form of a seal and could magically shed their seal skins to take human form and walk on land. They were very beautiful and shy, but if a man could trap a selkie woman and take her skin from her, he could trap her with him and and make her his dutiful wife...until she got her skin back, at which point, she would escape back home to the sea, leaving the man to pine away and die. Male selkies were less kind, being the veangeful sort who preferred to stay in the sea and seek retribution for the "indescriminate slaughter" of seals. Selkies were called Roane in Ireland, and there's a lovely little movie based on the story, called The Secret of Roan Inish. It's rather slow-moving, but very pretty and a nice little grownup fairytale film. The shade and softness of the suede I used for this reminded me of seal skin, so when I was trying to think of a nice girl's name that involved the ocean, Selkie seemed an obvious choice. The abalone chips are mostly cream and shades of brown, but there are also nice flashes of iridescence in them as well, ranging from soft peaches and golds to blue-violet and indigo. It's a good summery necklace, 16" long, with sterling silver findings, and a sterling silver extension chain can be added.

This necklace was really hard to photograph, and the only time I was ever able to get the color accurate (not too red or green) was in the larger pop-up image you get when you click the image from the shop page linked above. That image also has pretty decent detail of the color in the beads, though not all the iridescence can be seen, since the beads are all at different angles. It captures it fairly, I guess; every bead doesn't show the shine, but I tried to get a good mix of flash and non. If you want tons of color in your necklace, this is not the one for you. If, however, you want a natural necklace which also has some color to it, this is a good choice, and it moves nicely from sand and surf to a candlelit dinner at your favorite westside restaurant.

Now if only I could find the cool pair of smokey quartz earrings I made, so I can take their picture...look for those, the necklace version of the Anna Swarovski crystal jean jewels, and a necklace of faustite, Swarovski and pearl to match the Calliean apple-green turquoise and Swarovski crystal earrings. Those should be fairly easy to capture...I hope. Crystal can be difficult to capture well. I'm looking to get those all on the site this week, and then there's a rose quartz necklace with mother of pearl teardrop pendant, a lapis lazuli and cinnabar necklace, a cool leather and airbrushed wood "surfboard" necklace perfect for the beach, and a bunch of new bracelets of semi-precious stone, including rose quartz, mother of pearl, lapis lazuli, and tourmaline. Tourmaline necklaces, too. Oh yes - and the Beatrix necklace, at long last! :) I'm also about to launch a line of chakra jewelry (lots of work and thought going into that, so if you have any ideas or want a piece of your own, let me know!

ttyl; I have to find those darned smokey quartz earrings. :(

Jenie

New earrings and the Friday Finds

::sigh:: I am on the 3rd round of photographs of the new stuff, and ALL of them just look blechy. I am getting tired of taking pictures of the same stuff and over and over. I have never had this much trouble before, which is good, but I have to say, it's really frustrating. One of the pictures that did come out, though I have yet to shoot an alternate view of it, what with all the hideousness of just landing the first, is of the Libby faustite/apple-green turquoise earrings. I can not determine whether the stone is actually faustite or apple-green turquoise, since both natural stones are the same color, with pretty much the same color matrix. Faustite is a member of the turquoise group and gets its color from zinc, as opposed to the copper which gives turquoise its traditional blue coloring. It's a beautifully vibrant stone, with a grey to brown matrix, but these are color-treated - I suspect because they have a lot of grey matrix in them. I think they would have been really cool-looking on they're own, but they're still a really nice color and hand-wrapped in sterling silver. It took me a while to figure out how not to lose the curve in the final wrap, and identical symmetry is out of the question, but I like how they turned out.



I also have some pretty neat smokey quartz earrings out of some really awesome tumbled smokey quartz, beautifully clear. I'll try to get that photo up next. I wish I could figure out why I suddenly can't take a decent photo to save my life. :(

And now, the Friday Finds...on Saturday. Of course. :)

Kudos to Annette Rubin, President and CEO of Belli Cosmetics. It's about time someone came up with a website that utterly panders to the vanity of pregnant women. And no, I do not mean that in the sarcastic way in which it came out. I mean pregnant women deserve to be pampered and indulge in products designed especially for them, and Ms. Rubin has done so beautifully. She's no dim bulb when it comes to marketing, either. Kudos, Annette. Good job.

These are handsdown the coolest wall stencils I have ever seen, and you can buy the color-coordinated paint, too, so your stencil comes out the way it's pictured. For that matter, you can buy anything else you might need to stencil. It's a pretty neat site, if stencilling is your bag.

I do not care for Uncommon Goods in general, but these potato parchment bowls are way cool and really pretty. It's kind of amazing someone came up with the concept, and I have to laud artist Margaret Dorfman, hence the pimp.

Okay, shoppers. I leave you to your own devices with these, but they are not my cup of tea. At all. Especially at 32 bucks a pop.

The geek in me loves The Cubes, on the other hand. Seriously, I think they're brilliant, and I love the little slide show intro on the main page, with Also Sprach Zarathustra playing under it. The whole thing is genius.

And now if you will excuse me, I have a bunch of pendulums to make for a meeting with a vendor this week.

que sera sera,
Jenie

When it rains...

Gah. In helping someone else set up a Blogger blog, I inadvertently changed my own template. ::sigh:: I hate when that happens.

I have been trying to get images of the new product edited and the product entered into the store database. Unfortunately, life and some custom orders have conspired against me, so there will be more waiting. I'm sorry about that.

My good pal KJ is struggling with a terminally ill relative, so please keep her (and her family) in your thoughts and/or prayers.

On the brighter side, I got to make birthday earrings for someone this week, and presents are my favorite sort of custom jewelry to make. :) I love knowing someone is going to be surprised by what I'm working on, and I admit, I put even more care and attention into something I know is a gift for someone else. I'm careful and attentive to everything I make - because I'm a perfectionist, so it's in my nature anyway - but I am even more careful when I make presents. It takes me twice as long, because I want it to be perfect. It's really rewarding to get to be a part of someone's joy. To add to the fun, not only were the earrings for a fellow blogger from Diaryland, but the buyer was kind enough to email me about the gift opening, and then the giftee wrote about it in her weblog! That's more feedback than I usually get, so it was wonderful gratification and really made my weekend. :)

The other bright spot on the horizon is that thanks to my friend Hope's wonderful PR work, I have had to pony up a new "label" under which I will be selling to stores. You will still be able to buy jewelry at Dragonfly for the same low prices, but exclusive work for stores will be under the new label of Waterlily Studios. I'm trying to find a spiffy logo I like, with a small blue-green dragonfly hovering over a green lilypad and pink waterlily, so any whimsical artists out there, speak up!

And that's all I have time for. Pendulums await.

Happy Belated Memorial Day,
Jenie