Vintage Brooch Re-purposed

This vintage brooch with its unusual color combination of brown, green and pink, was in a stash of a customer's mother's jewelry, entrusted to me to make into something wearable...

 It just didn't fit with the other brooches, which mostly went into one large, "statement" piece...

So this week I took beads from another piece from the same customer - a set of various glass beads knotted onto gold-toned cording - and use the best ones to make the square brooch into a wearable necklace.

Not all the beads here were created equal - some were made of colored glass, others were clear with a color coating, which was coming off. But there were plenty in the brown and green shades needed.

In my own stash, I found a near perfect matching earring - just had to replace one bright green rhinestone with a deep pink and I had a perfect match.

The strung beads on the necklace were augmented with a large Swarovski crystal and a few other vintage beads.

The clasp was custom made from shiny brass wire to fit the scale of the piece. Sure hope Marjorie enjoys wearing her mother's unusual brooch.

Apple Core Beads

My little apple core beads got noticed in my long-neglected ArtFire.com listing! Tis the season for fall fruits, so I guess the collection curator searched me. See my tutorial for making these beads, published in the October 2009 issue of Polymer Cafe.

This year I'm making other things - covered egg ornaments and mummies and broomsticks.

I  think Baghead is my favorite, but  this mummy is cute, too.

He inspired my smaller Mummy Face Brooches.....

Each one slightly different, with varying amounts of graveyard aging  -  they have been buried for many years, some of them. You think it's clean in those old tombs???

I was also curious about making broomsticks. I used raffia with both copper wire and twigs, using wire, wrapping and stitching for different types of brooms. Not exactly Harry Potter's Firebolt or even an older Nimbus 2000, but perhaps useful for someone. These are about 4" long. The earrings were shorter...

View ALL my new eggs and seasonal stuff on my Picasa web album here.

Felt Food You Can Wear!

My friend Jenny at Eclectics - an artists' cooperative in Kansas City (where I sell my stuff) saw my felt food and said, "I think some people would love to wear these. Why don't you make some smaller bananas for pins??" Of course, she makes a lot of cool woolen things to wear, like flower brooches made from old, felted wool sweaters or other fibers, like this heart.

 

However, I dutifully tried it while staying out of my studio to protect my poor fractured arm - hand sewing shouldn't be considered a high-impact activity, right? Today I placed some of my results into my gallery inventory for all to see.

Actually the banana was easy - it was the strawberries that were tricky. A single felt strawberry is easily made from a semi-circle of red felt.

• Fold in half and seam up the radius edges. Knot.
• Add running stitch around the top (the round edge), draw tight and knot.
• Stuff with fiber and stitch closed.
• Cut a 3 or 4 lobed green leaf piece.
• Stitch leaves over the hole and whip stitch around all leaves.
• Add tiny yellow embroidery stitches to simulate seeds.

Voila!  A strawberry! Sounds simple, right? Well, it is - IF you are making a whole strawberry.

If you want to make a half a strawberry, which is flat on one side (for the pin-back to be attached, which is what I did) it's a bit more complicated. The above photo is a whole strawberry. This is two half strawberries....look the same right?

Nope - the back is flat. And it doesn't even show! Wonder if anyone really will want to wear one of these???