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Dr. L's Jewelry (Part II): The Bead Sanctuary |
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2009-01-23
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Dr. L's Jewelry (Part II): The Bead Sanctuary
All righty, so here is all my storage. Now, just in case you haven’t heard my show (that can’t be so!) I’m very compulsive about things. That way I can multi-task. So if you want to take a peek (hardly anybody on the face of the earth has seen this), these are my bead drawers. And all the stones are labeled including how much I spent on them, and everything is in alphabetical order.
So, for example, here’s aquamarine and then we would come down to coral and citrine. And then we would work our way down to various and sundry jaspers and, if you would pan, you‘d see that all of these [drawers] are filled. Let’s just say I collect. These are great, these are from Hawaii. [Puts beads around her neck.] One day I’ll make something like that for myself. I keep saying that and I never make anything for myself. But isn’t that cool looking, just like the way it is? With a really sharp clasp?
All right…the way I go about making something is I literally just come here and sometimes just open a drawer. And I stand there and I look, and I pull out something. I like stones that have weird shapes. These look like stalagmites and stalactites. I mean rounded skewed, oblong skewed, square is more interesting. The more weird the better. These look like…actually you can’t, you probably can’t see them at that distance…but they look like roses. And so I would put a black pearl on there. So, I take my time and try to find something that talks to me. I’ll pick it up and I’ll go, “Yes. I have to do something with that.”
Now, mostly, I have a prejudice to use pearls with just about everything. So I have pearls of every size, of every color. Mostly I like the pearls that are weird. None of these are weird, they’re all nice. Ahh, yes. Weird shapes of pearls, because I think they really do something really wild with stones. If you put some round, civilized-looking stones with pearls that go in all kinds of directions… I think that adds texture to things.
And one of the things I have a ton of, if you’d like to come back this way, and peek in here, is all the metal. So these are spacers, silver and gold beads, clasps. I have everything highly, highly, highly, highly organized. So when I want clasps, I just know to pull out this one and then I decide [looks down at cracked plastic container] yeah, I stepped on it once, sorry…well, you know, if you leave them open on the floor, and there are three of them, you can’t see the clarity, and I tend to step on them. But that’s something, don’t…I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s just something that happens to me. And I don’t throw it away because I like these boxes, and they’re hard to find. But I have clasps of different textures and sizes and shapes and confirmations and all of that. So, I usually go last to that. First I make the creation and then I decide what clasp is going to best bring it together. So if I had square clasps and I had something square about the metal or the stone that I’m working with, I like to see that coordinated.
But my favorite thing is a design that brings out three-dimensionality. So, one of the new things that I’ve been working on are bracelets. And you’d think, “Oh. It must be easier because they’re shorter.” No, actually, they’re harder than a whole necklace. In a whole necklace, I have a long range where I can be creative. But in a bracelet, as you will see here, I have a short distance to make a statement. When I go to these bead fairs, I look for strange and odd things that I can use. And here are these square pieces of silver. And I guess, some people just put thread or wire through that. Not me. I have to figure out how to get beads through there. And it was a lot of fun to figure out how to get the wire through the silver, the bead, and back through out the silver again. And, I figured it out. And one of these days I’ll tell you, but not now.
So here are some of my new styles. These have roses, so the silver accent is very, very important. And you use pink and it gives you a very sweet, garden feeling. I thought this was from outer space. These are actual beads and what they are, are scrunched up wires. I guess somebody had a fit one night and scrunched them up and then thought, “Somebody will buy them”, and then there I was. This is a little more conventional; pearls and stones. Those are turquoise. A little more conventional. I try to make things that I think everybody would like. Now, that’s more wild. That’s jade and amethyst; serpentine jade and amethyst. Now that’s wild. I’d like that for one earring. Actually, I think that would work quite well. See now, just standing here talking to you, I’m getting this idea to make these very long, wild earrings to go with the bracelets…you never know when it’s going to strike.
And then I like to use a lot of different stones in one place. The square, the turquoise, the sort of oblong…we call those potato shaped, are the pearl, and then we have the peach coral. And you put them together and it just makes a lot of texture. And there you go, with that. So that’s the newest thing I’ve been doing. And now, for our next step, I’m going to show you how I actually go about to start figuring out and making one of these.
End of Part II, to be continued in Part III
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