A Few New Jewel Objects

We are still working steadily in our little pygmy forest studio, getting ready for our two May shows and the show up in Salem, Oregon in July at which we have been accepted to participate. We are looking forward to that and also taking a week afterwards to wander home down the wonderful Oregon coast.

On the left are images of jewels we've recently finished. We've been working on some smaller heart pendant designs, the left two are close to nickel size and the one on the right is closer to quarter sized. The pendant at the upper right is called Spike, it's inspiration was a martial arts tattoo that I saw on the Internet, it's number three of a series. The earrings at the bottom right were a joint project although Carlie did most of the work, I made the lotus shape at the top. I traded them to her for ear wires that she makes for me to use on my earring designs. We pass parts back and forth between our work benches as well as ideas. If you have any interest in additional details of scale, materials and price of any of these jewel objects email us at
jica@mcn.org

Making Heart Jewelry

It's interesting to note that we both had made jewelry for well over 30 years before either of us had created a heart design. I'm not sure of the reason, it's not like I thought of it and then rejected it as a cliche, it's just that I don't ever remember thinking of it. Then about 8 or 9 years ago we scheduled an art show at the San Jose Convention Center on Valentine's day weekend and as we were thinking about the show we sort of both said at the same time, "Oh, Valentines's day, we should make some hearts. And we did, each of us made several. And what we found out was a couple of things, one was that people like to buy heart jewels, and the other was that it was fun and there seemed to be an endless range of designs to create using the heart motif. So, a great variety of hearts has become a part of our jewelry output and will likely continue to do so for some time, probably til the end of our jewlery making careers. Basically every heart we have made has found a home. And that is a lot hearts. The collage to the right is a small sampling that I created last week to send to two clients for whom I'm working on jewel designs. Let me know if you have any interest in hearts and I'll email you new designs as we create them. Right now we are making some of the smallest hearts we have made, nickel size or just a little bigger. Who knows where we'll go from there.

New Work

Starting this week I'm going to start posting a collage of work we have just finished, this is number one of that series. I will create a page called weeks work soon and will put them there. These pieces are for sale, if you have an interest in any of them send us an email at jica@mcn.org and we'll send you more specifics, scale, price, materials, etc. We have been working steadily, we were hoping to be on our way to Arizona right now to do a show that we've done off & on for over 20 years but we didn't get in this year, something that happens every so often. It's a very competitive show with probably 1200 artists applying from all over the US for a few over 200 spaces. We're not bummed out but we'll miss spending a couple of weeks in the sunny desert. The upside is that we will have exceptional selections of jewels for our May shows in Davis and Los Altos. It won't make any difference in our year's income by year's end, we'll have more to sell at our other shows. We are interested in selling things off this blog and I'll be concentrating on figuring out exactly how to do that in upcoming months. This blog will give clients who only see us once a year a chance to see a lot of our work that they wouldn't get a glimpse of otherwise. To keep our cash flow flowing we'll be concentrating on completing special orders and I'll be pursuing my other money making modes with my monthly book sales and my computer tutoring.