What's on your Worktable Wednesday

This week I'm working on a piece that I have been working on for a while.  It's called "Where the Blacktop Ends" and it's actually named after one of my favorite songs (that link will get you to the official video, please don't judge the look! He was young and mullets were still in style).  Keith Urban has been my favorite artist for a long time.  His music is often a source of inspiration to me, and this particular song has not only been my favorite, but it was the first KU song that really caught my attention so many years ago.  Not a day goes by that I don't listen to some KU song, sometimes to help keep my focus at the office, or to help make the long drives in LA traffic easier or just to sing along at the top of my lungs.  I've been lucky enough to meet him twice now, and he is one of the nicest celebrities I have ever met.  I could go on and on, but lets just say, I'm a proud Monkey!  Anyway, back to my worktable & "Where the Blacktop Ends"...

Gonna kick of my shoes and run in bare feet

Where the the grass and the dirt and the gravel all meet

Goin' back to the well, gonna visit old friends

And feed my soul

Where the blacktop ends

I've always had some specific ideas in mind when I listen to this song, and I was hoping I could convey some of them through the stones I chose for this bracelet.  I started out by finding some African Jade rounds, Brownsite cubes and Labradorite chips representing the grass, dirt and gravel.  I compiled them all into what I thought was going to be a cool bracelet, but something was missing.  I knew for certain it wasn't right, when I found myself not wearing the bracelet very often.   It looked something like this...

Pretty, but just not really working for me.  With things not looking quite right, I thought I would add a little sparkle.  I picked up some crystals the other day in Jonquil (a light yellow) and Azore 2AB (a light blue), and started trying to weave them into the design without taking the whole thing apart.  It's looking like this now:

I got about half way through, and while it's definitely better, I'm still not sure this is what I want it to look like.  I think these beads just may need a little more "breathing room" so to speak than most of my designs, so I think I'm going to end up taking the whole thing apart and starting over.  That's ok, though, because I've recently learned some new techniques that I think I can implement that will make this bracelet even better.  I'll for sure post the final piece when I'm done with it.

Are you working on anything interesting?  Who is your favorite artist, and have you ever made something inspired by one of their songs?

Color Palette Mondays

This weekend we went to Las Vegas to celebrate my in-laws's birthdays.  In case you don't know, it's HOT in Las Vegas this time of year.  I think it was somewhere around 110 degrees both days - that's way too hot for me!  On our drive home, we saw this beautiful sunset, and we stopped to take a few pictures.  This is one of my favorites...

That's my husband taking his own pictures, I just can't resist snapping pictures of him taking pictures when we're out :)  I had every intention of posting this Sunday night, when we got home, but we hit a big traffic jam, and the normally 4-ish hour trip ended up taking us 9+ hours.  It was exhausting, and since we left later than we probably should have, we didn't make it home until nearly 1am!  So, I'm a day late, but I hope you enjoy this one anyway, I sure did!  

Did you do anything exciting over the weekend?  

Color Palette Mondays

One of my favorite design-y bloggers is Brandi over at Brandi Girl Bog.  She's big on color inspiration, and if you know me, you know how much I love colors!  One of the things she does is make color palettes from pictures that she has taken (or found, depending on the week).  I thought this sounded like a fun way to find new color combinations.  So, here's my first one.  The photo was taken at one of our favorite places, and our favorite ride - the Mad Hatter's Tea Party @ Disneyland in California.  Erik and I often ride this ride - you know the kind, where you sit in a teacup and turn the crank in the center to make it spin around like crazy - and it's become "our ride".  One of our favorite things to do is use my camera ('cause it's small and easy to control when you're spinning around that fast) on a long exposure setting aimed upwards towards the brightly colored lights to get pictures like this:

We could seriously do this for hours on end, the images created are always beautiful and always unique.  One of these days we were standing near the Tea Party ride, and decided to try to capture the spinning cups as well as the lights.  I think this is one of my favorites from that shoot, as well as it's one of my favorite color palettes!  I use these colors together often.  Enjoy!

What's on your Worktable Wednesday

(even though I'm writing this on Thursday, and you're going to read it on Friday... sigh). 

So I wanted to start this new thing, something I could do every week, that would help me both make more jewelry and have one less day that I have to come up with an idea for a blog post but still have something to post.  I saw this one on one of the blogs that I have been checking out lately, and I hate to say I have no idea which one, but I don't.  I apologize to who ever I stole this idea from, and I would give you credit if only I could remember who you were.  Anyway, it's called "What's on your Worktable Wednesday" - you know, 'cause it's all W's - where you share take a photo of what you're working on right now.  It would help me make more jewelry since it would be lame to be working on the same things 2 weeks in a row! I'm actually working on something tonight that I wanted to share with you - but I can't share the finished product yet, it's a gift!). So I'm going to share it as the first post in my series of WWW's (that's less of a mouthful than What's on your Worktable Wednesday, don't you think?  We shall call is WWW from now on) even though it's Thursday already (and you're not going to read it till Friday...)

Here's what I've got out tonight... 

...black wire in 24 & 20 gages, 4mm & 6mm Swarovski Crystals in Capri Blue and Crystal AB & some jump rings with a gunmetal finish.  I'm still debating between the 2 heart sizes I made here, but I think I'm leaning towards the smaller ones.  Hopefully I can finish this in the morning - I'll post the finished product after I give it away! 

What are you working on this week???  Anyone have a good weekend project going?  

Santa Cruz Beads

2 weeks ago (June 26th) was our second anniversary.  The hubby and I decided to take a mini-vacation and get out of town for a few days.  We headed up to San Francicso to stay with my aunt & uncle for the weekend.  On the way up there, we stopped in Santa Cruz over night.  We stayed in a beautiful Victorian Bed & Breakfast  right across the street from the Santa Cruz pier.  I really wish we could have stayed longer there, because it as beautiful!  Santa Cruz is one of the only piers in California that still has it's boardwalk operational, complete with carnival rides and a 100+-year-old carousel!    As soon as I sort through the rest of my photos from the trip I'll post some of them here because that pier is really cool - there is a whole layer underneath the pier that you can access and all kind of animals live down there!  The best part about our day in Santa Cruz - we found two bead stores!  I scored just a couple of things at each store, but it was fun to sort through all the goodies, and to see how the stores differed from the ones I'm used to down here.  I think the one thing that was most different for me was that most of their inventory was sold "by the bead" rather than "by the strand".  I usually prefer to buy my beads by the strand because I tend to shop by inspiration (hence the name of this blog) rather than because I have a specific project in mind.  This means that I will rarely know how many of each bead I will want for a design, I will just buy which ever strands speak to me and hope I can find something to go with them later!  That's not to say that I didn't make some good finds up there.  So, here's where we went, and what I got.

Our first stop was Bead It! in downtown Santa Cruz.  They had an adorable little storefront, right in the walking part of the downtown.  They had a bunch of unique charms (mostly what I picked up) and I had fun looking through them because good charms are hard to find.  I found the Ferris wheel charms that I have been looking for (watch for them on an upcoming project), some brass hedgehogs that I'm not sure what I'm going to do with quite yet but were WAY too cool to pass up, and some really pretty blue glass flower beads.  I wish I could have bought a strand of the blue glass ones, because they were so beautiful!

Our second stop for the day was Monkey Girl Beads.  Like Bead It!, their focus seemed to be individual beads rather than strings (they did have some gemstone strings, but nothing unusual or extraordinary).  despite my preference for strands, I really wish Monkey Girl Beads was closer to my house!  They had such a great selection of silver & plated charms & findings, I nearly spent a small fortune there.  As it was, I spent more here and got way less beads, but they were SO worth it! I got these 5 tiny silver flowers and 2 pairs of tiny silver wings (they're almost actual size in this photo) :

 The other thing that I found that was different up there was that, since you were buying single beads rather than strands, you were given your purchases in tiny bags that were taped shut so the beads wouldn't fall out.  When I was pulling these 2 tiny bags out of my purse later, I felt a little like I had picked up drugs rather than beads :

That's my dime-bag of bead crack from Monkey Girl Beads.  (it's about 2"x2.5")   All in all a good beading experience - and for sure stop into these 2 stores on your next trip to Santa Cruz!  We went to several more bead stores in the San Francisco area, including one in Berkeley, but the inspiration didn't hit again, which was kind of a bummer.  I've found that sometimes it's like that though.  Most days I can go into any bead store and find something that I just have to have, no problem.  But other days, I can go into my favorite store and come out empty handed.  I'm just happy for these finds!

Do you like to stop at bead stores - or other specialty hobby stores -  while on vacation?  Do you have a favorite find from a trip that you wish you could go to again? 

Date Night

A month or so ago, my husband and I decided that we needed a "date night". Now, before you ask, no we don't have kids and we haven't been married for that long either. But that doesn't mean we don't get stuck in the rut of eating dinner in front of the TV - each of us on our own computers and thus barely speaking - most nights. So, in an effort to combat that, I called date night. We went to the 2nd street area of Long Beach to a place called Color Me Mine. If you've never heard of them, it's one of these places where you can make a ceramic piece - you choose a pre-created unfinished ceramic piece of varying size, complexity & price and "paint" it with the special glazes they have. You leave it there and they fire it for you, turning your hard work into a one-of-a-kind piece. It's something I've been wanting to try out for a while. Here's what we picked :

I have to tell you now, I have a bit of an obsession with all kinds of semi-tacky lawn ornaments - especially pink flamingos & garden gnomes. I find them fascinating, especially the older looking ones. I have a gnome that used to belong to my grandfather, and he has a prominent place right above our TV (we live in an apartment with a shared backyard and I would fear for his safety out there). I think he started the fascination with gnomes, but I've loved all things lawn-ornament-y for a while. (I also like to make up words. I can't help it.) Suffice it to say, I loved the movie Gnomeo & Juliet. Anyway, back to my date night story... I turns out that we are really slow painters! These little guys took us 2 visits of about 2 hours each time to finish. The really nice woman who was working the first night said to us as we got started "now, you know we close at 10 right?" and we just scoffed - 2 hours will be plenty of time to finish this paint job! No way!!! Neither one of us got more than half way done the first night.

Well, one of us got a little more than halfway done, but still... I'm happy to report they turned out beautifully! We both had a blast deciding on the colors, and sitting there painting surrounded by a bunch of other would-be-artists. (though there was a girl in there the first night who made this beautiful coffee mug - I think she may be a real artist!) I would love to go back, they had a bunch more things I wanted to paint - and even the hubby enjoyed himself! Here are the finished gnomes, after firing. Bet you can guess which one was mine!