Inspired by Reading Book Club Bridge of Birds and Journey to the East Blog Hop

Today is the reveal for the November and December selections for  Andrew Thornton's Inspired by Reading Book Club.  Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart and Journey to the East by Herman Hesse.

We are doing the two months together due to the two major Holidays that came during that time and our lack of time to fit them in sooner.

I no sooner began to read Bride of Birds than I became quite taken over by the idea of making a necklace focused on the central theme of the book:  a quest to find the Great Root of Power.  I spent quite a bit of time looking into what the ginseng root looks like and than proceeded to build one out of polymer clay.  It enchanted me.  The Great Root took hold of my mind and guided me into making a larger than life necklace of charms that bespeak of  magic, love and the unspeakable!!

Once I made the Great Root (see below)

The Great Ginseng Root by Mary Harding

I began on the chain of all chains--from Cindy Wimmer's book The Missing Link.  I spent countless hours bending wire, trying to figure out how to use the stepped pliers and finally tumbling it for half an afternoon  to wash away my many wire working mistakes.  

The chain is magnificent.

chain made from Cindy Wimmer's sliding rings link in her book The Missing Link: part before patina and part with a Liver of Sulfur patina

It was some weeks later that the Great Root lead me to discover the charms I needed to make .

Magnolia bud charm

Love charm

Magical Leaf Charms

Dragonlike charm

Jade Green bead charm

And when I was exhausted from all this creating and making I collected up the Great Root, the magnificent chain and the large polymer charms and put them all together into the

Bridge of Birds Magical Charm Necklace

Bridge of Birds Magical Charm Necklace by Mary Harding

A special thank you to Christine Damm for teaching me how to use polymer clay and for helping me find my inner polymer child.  I am having so much fun!!!  Another special thank you to Andrew Thronton for hosting the Inspired by Reading Book Club and giving  us this forum to display our inspirations and creations.

I hope you will check out what others have made.  Clicking  HERE will take you there.

Inspired by Reading Book Club Sneak Peak

The blog hop for Andrew Thornton's Inspired by Reading Book Club  is tomorrow, January 8, 2014.  

Since we are doubling up two months because of the Holidays we have a choice of  books to write about  Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart and Journey to the East by Herman Hesse.

This picture is of two beads that will be featured in the necklace I am making that has been inspired by Bridge of  Birds.  Both books are rich in imagery so I am sure you will find  lots to read about and look at. I hope you will stop by tomorrow and see what we all made.

Hold Your Fire Cold Connections Boot Camp Blog Hop LMAJ

Close up of  HOPE  Toggle Clasp constructed with cold connections by Mary Harding

Love My Art Jewelry has been doing  a series of Jewelry Boot Camps. The idea is to promote and teach skills for making handmade jewelry with handmade components:  an idea I fully support.  The current Boot Camp  is called  Hold Your Fire which  is about learning how to put metal together without using a torch.  Instead of soldering two pieces of metal together, we learned alternatives that do not require a torch, such  as screw rivets, tube rivets, metal eyelets, escutcheon pins, and nail head rivets. For my project, I used 1/16 inch short and medium brass eyelets that I purchased from Objects and Elements.  They are a bit tricky to use without splitting them, so it is a good idea to used the rounded side on the front of your piece.  I used my center punch and a very light tap with my chasing hammer on the punch and then used the ball  head of my hammer to gently tap around the edges until they curved and formed a tight bond with the metal.  

The toggle bar is also designed with brass eyelets and one of them has a balled head end pin threaded through it and wired wrapped into a loop on the underside.  I like this way of making the loop since it doesn't allow any escape route for the stringing material.

Close up of wrapped wire loop made through the tube of the brass eyelet.  You can also see what an eyelet should not look like when it gets split by heavy hammering,.

You can see what others made by following this LINK and scrolling down to the inlinkz list of participants.  I look forward to the next Boot Camp on Love My Art Jewelry. Thank you to all of you who work so hard to provide us with your wonderful ideas and techniques.

4th Annual Challenge of Color Hosted by Erin from Treasures Found

This is the 4th Annual Challenge of Color hosted by the gracious, very talented and generous Erin Prais-Hinz on her blog TreasuresFound; my second yearof participating and a wonderful feast for the eyes blog hop. This year we were asked to pick a palette from ColourLovers. We could also play a word game with the palette to give it a name.  I chose to pick an already created palette.

Here is the palette I chose from the ColourLovers web site.  It is called  Southwestern Sunrise.

seems my color brain still gravitates to the land of my childhood:  the southwest

This marvelous palette was created by Sunmeadow

You can view it in its full glory on ColourLovers here

With this bright and varied palette I made what I call a free form herringbone stitch double wrap bracelet.  I say free form since there is no specific color pattern to my piece.  I randomly stitched the bracelet with my Southwestern Sunset palette of  seed beads and twin beads strewn on my beading tray.  Some years ago I found little lazy susans that had a cloth surface that is perfect for containing seed beads and for picking them up with a beading needle.

Unfortunately I have not been able to find any like them since, but I have quite a few since I  bought up a bunch for beading classes I teach.

Although peyote stitch is my favorite off loom beading stitch, I really enjoy the challenge and symmetry of herring bone stitch.  It is always worked in pairs which means you can do some fun things when you think in pairs.  For example it was fun using some of the new twin beads on this bracelet since one twin is equal to 1 pair of seed beads. 

Twin Beads I used in my bracelet

I also enjoyed the challenge of making the clasp an integral part of the bracelet since making the external button hole always puts me in a stitching tizzy and usually ends up too tight!! The pair structure of the herring bone made it easy to use this as a way of creating a negative space for the button.

integrated button hole and my handmade copper button

Overall the bracelet also reminds me of a Persian carpet and rich colors of exotic lands.  

Here is a picture of it all finished up with one of my handmade buttons.

finished double wrap bracelet

Thanks so much Erin for organizing this fun event.  Please visit the other participant by heading over HERE,

Shop Handmade For This Black Friday Cyber Monday Weekend

Donut Focal by Mary Harding

I am participating in the Art Walk Etsy Team and the Love My Art Jewelry SHOP HANDMADE on Etsy Promotion this Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend by offering a 25% discount in my Etsy Shop with coupon code CYBER25 .  Use it at checkout to get the discount.

You can find the many other shops that are participating by visiting  these Blogs for a list of links

LoveMyArtJewelry

Art Walk Etsy Team

Some pictures of new work in my shop that is part of the 25% discount

Use coupon  code CYBER25 at checkout to get the reduced price

large donut focal  by Mary Harding

Dragon Fly Toggle Clasp by Mary Harding

Copper Tiny Daisies Pendant by Mary Harding

   

Tree Leaf Pendant by Mary Harding 

Spruce Fir Tree Bough Cabochon

Tomato Flower Bud Toggle Clasp by Mary Harding

I hope you enjoy your Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend shopping for Handmade on Etsy sales.

Thanks so much for stopping by,.

Inspired by Reading Book Club October: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me Edited By Kate Bernheimer

Inspired by Reading Book Club October 2013 selection

Bats, a black cat, a full moon, mournful howling sounds and a young newly wed bride fill out this Hansel and Gretel inspired story by Francine Prose, who in turn inspired me to make my necklace for this month's blog hop.  A necklace I have titled The Messenger.

The Messenger  Necklace by Mary Harding

For Andrew Thornton's  Inspired by Reading Book Club October selection we read from My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me edited by Kate Berheimenr.  What a treat!!   And I surely would have missed it if I had not been part of this reading group.  Thank you Andrew!!  I don't usually like short fiction but reading modern Fairy Tales is very different from reading  modern short stories I found out: mind blowing and uplifting rather than grim and depressing.(over generalization, I am sure.)  From the first story, titled Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child by Joy Williams, I knew I was in a new and wonderful world.
Of  the stories I have read so far, I liked Tim Shepard's  Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay , based on Italo Calvino's Fairy Tale Jump Into My Sack, the best but I could not get any ideas of a something I would want to create.
It wasn't until I tried out Hansel and Gretel by Francine Prose, a favorite author of mine, that I got some images and ideas for a piece.  That story seemed to march right into my imagination and tell me what to do. Lots of reasons for that, the setting is the hills of Vermont,  the narrator is 21 and after 10 days already unhappily married,  visiting a possible evil witch,she thinks, who is the mother of her new husband's  past "love of his life" .  She wonders if this is what it would be like if Hansel and the witch are in cahoots  when they are served a dinner of wild mushrooms and kid around about watching to see if she shows signs of being poisoned before they begin eating.

I got my idea for the title of this necklace from the 20 years later part of the story.  I decided that it would be a kindness to poor Polly if she could know, at least on some level, that things would turn out all right and that she would not be be subjected to such emotional cruelty by her husband for too long and that she would go on to lead a very full and productive life.  I hid messages to Polly within the necklace in the long copper tube beads.  They are stamped into the metal but disguised as beads-- which fits in with the other theme in the story.

             closeup of necklace showing the long hidden message tubes, disguised as beads


The skirt shaped pendant is made from polymer clay and was completed in part in Christine Damm's Art on
Farm Intensive workshop earlier this month.

                                               close up of the skirt pendant by Mary Harding

 I did the coloring when I got home, added the wire wrapped stones, the bail and then made the metal message beads just this week. I used one of  Cindy Wimmer's tutorials in her new book, The Missing Link  to construct  the wire wrapped link, called Whirligig, to suggest the large eyes of fear our Gretel must have had that night they spent in the barn with the spooky sounds of bats and a black cat.  Halloween come early!!

All in all, story by story, and bead by bead I had a wonderful time with My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.  My thanks to Andrew Thornton for introducing us to this marvelous book and to Kate Bernheimer for collecting the stories under a single cover so that we could read them.

I hope you will check the other participants.  Here is the list of blog hop participants!!

Ptaszynski Diana . Vintage blue studio
http://vintagebluestudio.typepad.com/vintage_blue_studio/2013/10/inspired-by-reading-book-club-october-reveal.html
Andrew Thornton  Our host!

Sharon Palac

Mary K McGraw

Jeanne Steck

Sarajo Wentling

Mary Harding

Jenny Davies-Reazor

Sue Kennedy

Sally Russick

Erin Prais-Hintz

Art on the Farm: A Calling to Explore and Create

I have just been home one full day since I attended Christine Damm's Stories They Tell Intensive workshop.

I felt called to Art On the Farm by Christine's vibrant, creative and distinctly original art work which I have been following for some time.  She is a strong voice.  I wanted to spend time learning from her.

And so I packed up and went to Central Vermont at the peak of the Fall LeaF season and had a wonderful experience.

Christine arranged for us to stay in this lovely 1830's home.

View of the landscape in  Full Fall Color in Vermont

Christine's medium is polymer clay. Mine is ceramic clay.  I had never had any experience with polymer before I entered the doors of her classroom.  It was my thought and Christine's too that her teachings can be transferred across many mediums.  

We learned about FORM

work created by me in Christine Damm's workshop

Form in polymer is much more spontaneous than in ceramic clay due to the fact that the curing is so fast and the ability to add on is so easy.

AND COLOR

pendant colored by me in Christine Damm's workshop

Polymer is a color lover like myself's heaven

All these colors were added to the surface of the polymer. 

supplies table at Christine Damm's workshop

Christine demonstrating color applications to polymer

at her Art On the Farm Intensive Polymer Clay workshop

AND Assembling

Polymer is so easy to add on to that it really appeals to my way of thinking.   None of what is here in the picture was pre-planned.  I added on the loop to hang to the pendant by affixing it to the back after it had been cured and colored.  I then decided it needed the flower in the center so I made that and added it by drilling a little hole and affixing it with a balled end head pin I had brought along to the class.  The bead and tassle at the bottom, also an afterthought, as well as the colorful silk tie.  I liked the fact that I could build on and change directions at almost any point in the process.

How do I plan to transfer all this new knowledge to my ceramic clay work?  I am not sure.  Am I going to switch mediums and give up ceramic clay?  Not that I know of.  But  I do know that this workshop has been a very freeing, eye opening experience;  that I see ceramic clay differently than beforehand; and that I am artistically richer for having  been in Christine Damm's Intensive Polymer Workshop. 

Christine encouraged us to keep a journal of ideas and I know that I have been busily writing down and drawing out new ideas spawned by the workshop. I am excited to try them out soon.

When the workshop was over, we spent some time hanging out.  We visited  a charming cafe in the old train depot for breakfast where we could have talked for days and then went to some of Christine's favorite antiquing spots.
             

I love this wall of rust at one of the places 

And then it was time to say  "Goodbye."

Thank you Christine for everything!!!!

I highly recommend Christine's tutorial in Cynthia  Tinapple's Polymer Clay Global Perspectives.  Her work is cutting edge!!

Sale 15% off to Welcome in First Friday Art Walk for October

New copper clay pendants in my Etsy Shop today to kick off  The Art Walk Etsy Team First Friday Weekend. I am having a 15% off sale with coupon code ARTWALK15 to be used at checkout to get the discount.  Many of the Art Walk Etsy Team will also be having specials.  You can check them out HERE.
Coupon Code good until Sunday October 6 at Midnight.

                                             Copper Clay Pendant  Red and Iridescent leaves

                             I also have some new ceramic pendants, beads and cabs in my shop:

Ceramic Cabochon

Large ceramic cabochon with Ultrasuede backing 

Fall  Colors  Tree Leaf Pendant

Daisy Pendant Bold and Bright

NEW 2 hole beads

Fern Frond Pendant

Thanks so much for stopping by,