Always a smile!

"Shaylynn, WHY ARE YOU BLOWING A FAN IN MY FACE?!"

This is my sister, Rosie. If you've read my blog before, you've probably seen her quite a bit. She is a fearsome little girl who will gladly go defeat any dragon with her super-awesome taekwando skillz gained both from classes and from having four brothers, but she is such a sweetheart and girly-girl, too. Sometimes more of a girly-girl than me (when I was her age I hated it when fantasy books had romance instead of pure adventure. Just today, Rosie spent quite a while debating whether Miri from Princess Academy should be with Peder or the prince.)

Basically she is a real life princess.

Not too long ago I was photographing on of the Aurora Circlets I made (this time, finally with silk in pink champagne to more closely match the ribbon in OuaT), and she was in my studio making some jewelry. Of course I roped her in to being my little model minion. I am such an evil overlord sister. MUAHAhahaha!

She just got her hair cut (it used to reach past her hips) and positively squealed when she saw how "flippy and swingy" her hair is now, especially in these pictures.



I'm going to lose proper English for just a minute and enter the dialect of Tumblrspeak: d'AWWW ALL THE CUTENESS I. CAN'T. EVEN. WHAT.


She also modeled the circlet that Gwen wears as Queen in the BBC show Merlin. I was very excited to be able to create such a close replica, and Rosie was just ecstatic that I FINALLY made some jewelry based on her favorite show.


Then, I gave her a few tips and she photographed some pieces on me!


(Above is a double necklace set inspired by the one that was featured in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and below is a necklace I handstamped that says "all that is gold does not glitter").



She also got some ones with my face in it which is funny because I can't pull off the whole starry-eyed princess look.

Rosie has been becoming very good at photography and has been getting some beautiful shots of our baby sister "Josie." I should download the photos this weekend and teach her some basic Photoshop editing!


I'm so grateful that she'll come in my studio and pose for me at random times of the day! :) I sure miss her when I'm away at school!

Pegasus Carousel Horse

Last fall was my first "real" drawing class!

My junior (or was it sophomore? I am going crazy!) year of high school I took art classes from a local artist who taught from her basement, but she focused on giving me some some challenges and then just letting me have at it while she (and occasionally another student) also worked. I found that very helpful-- I had never before worked on artwork in the same room as someone else working passionately on a piece of art. She was very encouraging and helped me tremendously, but it wasn't a traditionally structured class.

(For new readers: I was classically homeschooled from sixth grade and and absolutely loved my education. I am not the least bit sore about not taking any "real" art classes. There simply weren't any available in our town, and homeschooling gave me the freedom and drive to pursue art in my own time and on my own terms. I spent a good deal of time drawing and painting, but even more time learning artisan crafts like the jewelry that I sell in my Shoppe. This opportunity to start my own business doing the things I love was amazing, even more so because my family has basically zero artistic background and yet my parents still supported me.)

I still don't know how I feel about my first drawing class. Structured art classes are an interesting thing. On one hand, being forced to sit and work continuously for three hours twice a week (plus homework), helped me out of pure brute force. By taking Drawing I and 2D design in the same semester, I spent more dedicated time on artwork than I ever had in the past.

Being able to make art for SCHOOL and not feel guilty about working on art before finishing other homework is the coolest thing ever.

Art classes are held in an old brick food factory a twenty-minute bus ride away from campus. The room was oh-so-lovely </sarcasm> and weirdly creativity-inducing in a dilapidated kind of way.



We got to sit at the most uncomfortable wooden art-horse-benches in the world (who the in world came up with the idea of straddling a wide slab of wood while leaning forward to draw on paper which you clamp onto another sheet of wood, which stays still only by magic and lots of muted swearing?). I loved the days when I got to class early and requisitioned an easel and stool. No sore back!


My favorite thing? We were allowed (and encouraged) to wear headphones. I started off just listening to music, but then discovered the joy of audiobooks. It's true that I do have some slight processing issues-- mostly because I'm such a visual person that 90% of my attention goes to what I see and I easily lose track of what I hear. However, I listened to some books that I've read before and the lack of skim-reading and the beautiful narration brought another dimension to the stories.



Drawing I consisted entirely of charcoal still lifes (except for the homework and final) with no pencil underdrawings or anything. By the end of the semester, I felt like screaming:

"I HATE CHARCOAL"

"WHY DID EVERYONE LET ME RIDE THE BUS BACK TO CAMPUS WITH CHARCOAL ON MY FOREHEAD, CHIN, AND NOSE? WHERE IS HERMIONE WHEN YOU NEED HER?"

"WHY THE HECK DOES MY PORTFOLIO CONTAIN ABOUT TWENTY DRAWING OF GOURDS WITH ELEPHANT TRUNKS, SHOES, VASES, AND BOWLING BALLS?"






Click "READ MORE" to see the rest of this post!

Awhile back, I made a picture tutorial on how to make ear cuffs. Amazingly, it has been my most popular blog post to date!

I've had several people write to ask questions about how to do certain steps, and I felt that a video tutorial would probably be helpful!

The video is embedded below, but if you can't get the embedded video to work, here's the link!


Here's the picture tutorial for how to make a simple ear cuff. I also have tutorials on making a swirly ear cuff which can have interchangeable dangles and a double-loop swirl ear cuff!

I started with a sheet of solid 18 ga copper and drew the designs I wanted to make with Sharpie.


The next step was sawing out all the individual pieces, bit by bit, completely by hand. 


I managed to break three saw blades and then break the fragments which I was still using to saw. I'm not particularly proud of that; my sawing technique needs a lot of help.

The bench pin I am working at is made out of pine. I simply cut out a v-notch and clamped it to my workbench. The yellow and black thing you see on the right of the picture is beeswax. I originally bought it for my pysanky egg-decorating, but it works pretty well for conditioning the saw blades.


At this point the pieces looked like this. (For those who don't get the reference, "OKAY" is an important line in The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. The movie just came out and, of course, my cheeks turned into rivers and the shoulders of my tshirt into overtaxed sponges. The story is so sad and so beautiful.)


Next, I etched the designs.

Sharpie works as a resist, so everywhere that I drew with Sharpie remained raised and everywhere else got eaten away by the Ferric Chloride acid. After soaking the copper in the acid bath I neutralized it in a solution of baking soda and warm water. To be on the safe side, after that, I dusted pure baking soda onto the dried-off copper and rinsed it off.


Copper looks like this after etching. It's not much until you attack it with steel wool.


You can't imagined out relieved and excited I was that this actually worked well!

The raised designs weren't very obvious, so the next step was oxidizing the metal!

I used my metal/leather hole puncher to punch the pieces (so I could string them on thin copper wire so  they wouldn't be so difficult to remove from the acid bath-- I learned that the hard way with the ferric chloride) and, wearing gloves, thoroughly scrubbed the pieces to remove debris and fingerprint oils.

(Fixing a the broken schnozzel for my hole puncher wasn't fun. I mostly bring this up because I love the word schnozzel. SCHNOZZEL.)


Then I prepared a Liver of Sulfur bath. This stuff smells like... well, sulfur. The rotten-egg variety of sulfur scent, to be more accurate. BLECH.


After neutralizing and cleaning, the copper is basically just black. Then I begin the process of very gently brushing with steel wool and polishing with three different grades of sandpaper. After a while, the raised designs are shiny and the recesses are dark brown or black (depending on how long I had them in the LOS).


Next, I filed and then sanded the edges. Sawing metal can create lots of nicks. You definitely don't want them catching on your skin, so I file every single edge. The sanding is to create a smooth, even shine on the surface of the copper.


Some of the pieces required more sawing at this point. The Celtic trinity knot was saw pierced, a process that lets me meticulously cut shapes out of the inside of a metal design. The new edges were filed and sanded, too.

I then used a spray called ProtectaClear (a body-salt resistant resin) to seal the oxidation and ensure that the nice polished raised designs won't naturally oxidize over time.

(Raw copper pieces-- like all of the copper wireworking I've done in the past-- naturally reacts with oxygen and turns dark brown over several months. A gently scrub with vinegar brings back the fresh, shiny copper).

One of the best things about the spray is that is keeps your skin from turning green! The greenness is not actually an allergic reaction, as I was taught growing up. It actually is a chemical reaction very akin to oxidation (the reason that pennies turn brown then green) and is just a buildup of molecules that washes right off the skin with soap. It's never a fun thing to deal with, though, which is why I am so fond of this spray. It's nontoxic, don't worry. :)


I used a dapping block on this small pendent to dome one of the pieces.

I haven't finished it yet but I'm doing another piece that is purely saw work with no etching or oxidizing.


The next several hours were spent doing techniques I am far more familiar with: beading and wireworking.

The results?



This "Mischief Managed" bracelet is inspired by the Marauder's Map in "Harry Potter" and has chainmaille in Gryffindor colors.



 Medieval Swirl Hair Fork-- the front design was inspired by some circular knotwork I saw in some medieval manuscripts I was studying. Yes I do that. Yes it is fun. Some of the artwork in old manuscripts is beyond amazing.


The Fault in Our Stars inspired necklace-- the iconic "OKAY".


Another piece difficult to name-- "Etched Leaf Pendant" which is this cool fern-like leaf design that I use in a lot of my drawings.



Another TFIOS necklace-- "Okay? Okay. Necklace"



Triquetra (or "Trinity Knot") necklace.

I am SO BEYOND EXCITED about this technique, even though it's crazy complicated. The possibilities are well nigh endless!!!!!!!

That being said, what do you think I should make? I am looking for ideas because when I try coming up with ideas on my own I get so many that I can never narrow in and decide and can thus wind up using none of my ideas!