Plum Twig Necklace

Yesterday before work I decided to make myself a new necklace. I'd been wearing my wire twig earrings lately, and thought it would be interesting to make a necklace in that technique that would incorporate the singed fabric flowers as well. I used annealed wire, which is dark, with pearlescent purple beads and a few sparkly glass beads. I like the asymmetry and the very organic shapes. I think I might try to make one in fall colors as well, for the season. Maybe in yellow and green, which with the black "branches" would look like linden trees in autumn.

Paper Teapots: Map and Pop-up

I've been very busy at the gallery lately getting everything ready for the teapot exhibition that just opened. Artists working in all different media submitted teapot sculptures both functional and conceptual. Unfortunately, and sort of ironically, I was too busy with the administrative end to have much time for my own teapots, but I made small versions of my two ideas: a map teapot, and an urban pop-up teapot.

The city pop-up one was made in the same way as the pop-ups I recently had at M55, but instead of two blocks, there were about eight different sections, including a handle and a spout.

The map teapot was planned out like a globe, with an inserted spout and a lid on top. I started with the same ink blot technique as I would for a flat map, with a fork around where the spout would be inserted, and then drew around it, making sure that the roads would be continuous once the whole thing was sewed up.

 And here they are installed in the exhibition:

Mini Watermelon

I'm going to take a quick break from posting about maps and pop-ups to share some photos of the most adorable watermelon that I picked last week from the vines on the porch. The vines have all shriveled, but two little watermelons were left. The littlest one was a little too squishy, but we ate the slightly bigger one, and it was delicious!