For about the past month I've been trying to come up with a version of the much-loved heart pendant that I like. It's been tough going, but here we are at last:

Textured paper, dusted with pearlescent pigment and a scattering of sterling leaf. What you can't see in this photo is the substrate layer of paper, which is a simple, white recycled paper made from the scraps of all my other projects. I think it works nicely in this application. Normally the recycled paper is a bit weak (short fibers, dontcha know) and can't take the treatment I dish out-- but here, the resin provides a good deal of strength and structure to the piece, so the recycled bits hold up perfectly well.

I think one of these would make an especially nice first wedding anniversary gift-- the first anniversary is the paper anniversary, after all!

Yes, I'm still making the recycled paper bangles, thank you for asking. Here's my latest, featuring a Robert Frost poem fragment, the last two lines of "The Black Cottage".

"There are bees in this wall." He struck the clapboards,

Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted.

We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.

I've been experimenting with making seed paper lately, and decided that something involving seed paper would be a fun spring freebie. Now, I also have all these odd-sized strips of paper left from various projects that I can't bring myself to throw away. (The ones leftover from making cards out of 8 1/2 x 11 ,for example). Turns out that leftover strips of paper + seed paper + a little bit of linen thread= cute little plantable matchbooks. I'll put a bowl of them out at the Luna Festival on Saturday if I manage to get enough of them made in time.

Experiments in cuff-ology

Another one! I'm crazy about the shades-of-grey + red combo right now. No text, but the mosaic took me forever (it's on the other side, too).

Bangle!

My mother-in-law clarified the bangle vs. cuff issue for me. I was using width as the crucial component of meaning, but apparently it's standard for presence vs. absence of an opening to be the relevant property. So now I know, and I can say with confidence that it's BANGLES that I've been working on (though I did start a cuff today, just because I could).

Anyway, my first one is done!

I'm fairly pleased. The structure is recycled paper, but the visible decorative part is not. The text reads, "Everything was grey and cold. As though to match the gloom around us, we ourselves grew silent." The author is Frank Boreham, whose 1919 book of essays I dug up rather randomly at Project Gutenberg, as is my wont. Wait till you see the one I'm working on now, with a Chekov quote!

Hello!

Hello, and welcome to my new blog! It's all very exciting. I'm not sure where to start; I was going to do a formal introduction of some sort, but have decided against. You, dear reader, will get to know me gradually through my posts, and that'll be better than a one or two paragraph attempt at a summary that no one will read anyway once I get going. I suppose that filling out my profile would help also.

For now, I'll just mention that I'm a jewelry artist/ paper artist. I'll be talking about my mad experiments here, updating twice weekly.

Last year (well, starting in midsummer really) was my first year doing this professional artist thing full-time and in earnest; I got to do some local shows and enjoyed getting to talk with people about my work. One question I kept getting at each show was whether my work was made from recycled paper. Well, the answer was no. I have a few styles of jewelry that I make, but I've been using brand spanking new cotton art papers for all of them, mostly because they stand up to the things I do to them in the way that my homemade paper just won't.

But it did get me thinking, and I vowed that as soon as the holidays were over, I'd work on incorporating recycled paper into my work somehow. I've just started (saving all my scraps and buying a new blender), but am already VERY excited about the results. I didn't want to just do recycled paper versions of my current styles, but to offer something different. Finally I came up with it: cuff bracelets (or are they bangles? Not sure about the difference. Anyway, they're wide and you slide them on over your hand). I'm in the process of applying the finish to the first two now-- I'll post pictures here in a couple of days. What's so wonderful about it for me is the sheer amount of space for text on them-- I can have some fun with layout and composition that a 1-inch square pendant just does not afford. My imagination is working quicker than the glue will dry. Stay tuned.