Grey Days

Happy Halloween from rainy Chicago!

Stone Path.
Grey outside, grey makies in here.

Look at this thing! I love it! There's nothing like grey for subtle textures and details.

Stormtide.
Asymmetrical choker? Damn straight.

What I didn't have patience for, for this batch, was elaborate names/quotes. Just wanted to get everything listed. I love how streamlined I have the process. Look, I didn't even bother removing the backgrounds from the mannequin pictures like I usually do.

Primate Song.
Although I did blur them and de-saturated them a bunch.

This one's called Primate Song because primary colors + primitive ... eh?

From a Vast Distance.
As you can see, I delved into my oversized stash. Going with my recent revelation that simpler is often better.

I feel like I tossed these together and they came out awesome, but it's only when I'm very inspired that I can "toss things together" and have them turn out awesome.  You know?

Through a Glass Darkly.
I don't know if other's will agree to the extent of wanting to wear these of course.

But check out that drama, hu?

Rotterdam.
This piece ended up rather wider than the other tin ovals I cut out, so I thought it needed a triple strand. It's a lot to organize.

In the comments, gretchennation asked if the patina on these was my doing. Actually, no, this tin was very grungy when found. I did end up messing it up where I curved the edges down for dimension (which, can we take a minute to appreciate? Thank you.), but other than that, I just applied several layers of protective sealant. But thanks for the question! Makes me feel important.

Vultuous.
So remember those resined ovals? Yeah. I sanded the edges and smeared grayish-olive alcohol ink on them before riveting too, in case you are wanting to try.

Hands of Fate.
Have I mentioned lately that I love making bracelets?

Bloom of Youth.
Orange!! What is happening?

Sunset.
Salmon? What? Also, necklace and earring set? Who am I and what have I done with me?

Golden Twilight.
Balanced asymmetricals. Would you even call this asymmetrical?
Grandmother's Martini.
This batch of earrings were super fun to make and, like with the necklaces, felt like they made themselves. beads and connectors from old-lady necklaces from the 50s, which my polymers went surprisingly well with! When I discovered alcohol ink on these spun cotton pearls is when everything fell into place.

Gifts from the Sea.
Even when I do "symmetrical" earrings, each of the elements included don't quite match, you know? Yeah I like that.

Overcast.
These dangle in a lovely way. The grey on the right is my polybaby, matched with one of my favorite Indonesians of all time.
*Jumps up and down and claps with glee*
*But only internally since in reality I'm just typing*

Beatnheart commented, "your writing is highly entertaining...I would love a novel...then you could make a bunch of money and made stuff out of real gold." OK, as super flattering as this is, unless you're J.K. Rowling I don't think anyone's making money from writing. Also, to write you need some overarching structure, i.e. plot, and all I'm good for is babble and non-sequitors. Case in point- look at this awesome picture of my dog:

We ordered him a new bed recently and it was quite a bit bigger than we expected:

Also since it's been forever since I shared a picture of my glorious self, here I am on one of the very rare occaisions I step out of my house. Mr. Devices dragged me out to renew my license. The fountain was dyed blue for sports reasons, and behind that's Chicago's famous Picasso.

After I saw this picture I shaved my head and thinned out my 'hawk. Then I had plastic surgery on my shnoz.









My dog is barking at trick-or-treaters.

Caffeinated Resuscitation!

Vitruvian Man.
Hey, hey, so hey, remember how I was talking all about not crea stuff recently and how I wasn't creating stuff recently and how lately I didn't seem to be making stuff?


Guess what I've been doing non-stop recently lately?

Aleph.
Yeah. What's up with that?

Could it be that I'm insane? Or that, well yes I am but that's nothing new, but rather that I've started allowing myself caffeine which I'm basically allergic to (i.e., it causes irritable bowel syndrome which is a nice way to say you shit your very soul out) so I hadn't been but now I have been and just talking like three imodium a day, everyday. Cuz it turns out imodium  has no negative side effects and doesn't interfere with anything in any way. And also cuz I discovered this stuff called electrolyte powder so I'm not in pain from how parched I am from the dehydration which caffeine also causes me- hey can you tell I've been having caffeine? This is me after half a cup of tea like 4 hours ago. That's how little caffeine I can normally drink. This entire paragraph was so unnecessary for me to share. Do you want to hear more about my diarrhea? Cuz I'll do it. I'll share. Don't tempt me.

Plight Your Troth.
This is gonna be my new threat- if I don't get a certain amount of comments/sales, I'm going to go into details about my bowel movements- AND YOU'LL ALL BE FORCED TO READ. There'll be a quiz before you get any more eye-candy. Wow, I gotta take a few calming breaths.
So these bracelets and all the earrings with light blueish tin you're about to see further below are all from one Uruguayan tin I just cut up. And I still have enough for two more bracelets and two more sets of cone earrings. If I decide on cones or ever make more or whatever.
Monachopsis.
(This one already sold?)
Above in blue and here the three first pitted beads are my polybabies. I made a bunch.

Play.
Check this wacky guy.

Will someone want some random dude on their wrist? Hm. Maybe a European who's really into futbol?

Sea So Deep.
I was looking at some previous stacks in my sold section. I'd sell them in sets of like 80, I swear. What was wrong with me? No wonder I couldn't get a decent picture!

So yeah, like I was saying, I'm back baby. While I'm not head over heels with the photo/listing process, the making is back baby! Idk but I'm in like the zone, that tunnel vision, suddenly 5 hours have passed type of mojo. Amazing. I'm so grateful.

Igniparous.
Here's that tin I mentioned.

Bluestocking.
With new polybabies.

Brave and Quiet.
So it's a couple days after I wrote the beginning of this and even without caffeine I now function. A switch has been flipped and I don't know why. Certainly I had to wait and completely give up on the idea of ever getting any impetus. I was looking up medical interpreter jobs for cryintabetsy. It's like a let-it-go-before-you-can-get-it-back kinda thing mebbeh?

Cosmogyral.
The texture on these polies comes from rock salt, but what makes it pop is the painting. First these are just striped white and translucent, then I paint a wash of dark acrylic and let it mostly dry. Then I sand off the coat of acrylic, so it only stays in the recesses. This also smoothes out the surface anywhere that pressing the rock salt in made it bulge. THEN I dab on some amber-colored alcohol ink but only on the top surface. You can do this with a finger or coptic marker, not with those applicator pads cuz those will allow some ink to seep into the crevices.

Pliocene. Rustic assemblage earrings with biwa pearl, labradorite and ...
That proly made not sense. The texture here is made by poking a tool into each bead repeatedly, more on that later.

Nepheliad. White ceramic cones and pearl earrings.
My inspiration here was to put little lace-edged bezel settings under these lovely cones, allowing a sort of chandelier situation to grow below. Naw, that's clever I don't care what you say.

Biognosy.
Man I love a successful pair of asymmetrical! Maybe I just love them so much because I see them displayed like above, together and not on a person. I wish people sent me pictures of themselves wearing my stuff. But the couple times I modeled my earrings for myself, yeah, I was always surprised at how flattering they looked. They don't just sit on either side of your face, the aesthetic sum is greater than the parts somehow. Which is, um, proly why people wear jewelry. Right.
Luminiferous Ether.
I landed me quite a prize. Someone was selling 50 little etheopian opal beads for $15, what's up wit dat? Check the flash.




Now how about some WIP?


Check out these babies! See where the texture makes a soft zig-zag? Sort of a sig-sag if you will? Ok, so I used this tool here to quickly poke a row of marks in one direction, then turned the bead and went the other direction. 

Because these marks were individually made and not from a stamp, it has a very organic look. I also painted these recesses a dark grey and sanded the surface as well. There were other textures involved and other paints as you can see. Mostly I just mucked around a lot.

Trying out some poly pins.

Oh so RomAntiqueSoul sent me these vintage unfinished kokeshi forms and I decided to paint them in shades of grey. Even doodled my ideas. I added the ruler so you can see how tiny they are, which is why I couldn't get the marks I made as smooth as I wanted. (Actually scraped a lot of it off with my exacto knife and tissue blade. Cuz wood is soft like that.) But yeah so I'm thinking of nailing those settings in the pic to the bottoms so I can do a dangly thing.

Ages ago I put a really thick layer of resin on this one picture that had too much going on for me to figure out which snippets to cut out. Sometimes when the resin is already there, it makes the selection process easier for some reason. So I cut these out and I'm thinking of riveting them to tin ovals as you can sort of see top left. But I'll do it after I give the tin some curve so I can use these in bracelets. Yaya.

Just a gorgeous section of tin is all. 
I have so many vaguely worked on bits and pieces but I love it! I've been flex-shafting the backs off some unwieldy geodes which came off keychains in Uruguay. It's a pain but the results are lovely.









Today, instead of animals, I want to share cool gifs from a site called Sploid:Insense burning in macro

A pill dissolving in water

Marines doing a landing exercise in South Korea


Tinted liquid "cosmos"


Which I liked so much I made more gifs.


Yeah. I made this gif (just googled how to) from this lovely movie.


And finally, a bit of cuteness- there's a video which shows how Disney recycled some animation through the ages because drawing is hard.
And since you were good and put up with my poop talk, here you go. You get one animal gif.