just tinkering.

I tinker. I stare at the pile and sometimes I got nothin'. Other days, my creativity flows, so much so that I only make one earring before moving on impatiently to the next design, forlorn single earrings strewn all over my workspace, my fingers refuse to move as fast as my brain on these days.

Wire wrapping is something I've been considering adding
to some of my designs. It's so pretty, but something
I still remain inconsistent at. I think this was my 3rd go at it.

It has taken me 4 months to know what to do with the lovely
filigrees atop this fringe. I bought this fringe - it was one of those -
oh oops, smaller than I thought! But I love them so much here.

Favorite high school earrings are the main component here -
yikes! they are truly vintage LOL - these clips from long ago
have been converted to a great looking long filigree earring.

I recently read article on another artist's blog about time spent tinkering, experimenting and failing. It made me feel better about my tinkering time - it's part of the creative process (no matter your hobby), although at times it feels like a mental block. I improve by experimenting, whether I succeed or fail.

"Those days of tinkering and taking stock are not lost time. You need those times to think and experiment and move things around... Even when you make something and it doesn't turn out, it's still valid time spent. It's going to happen whether you like it or not, this tinkering. In fact it HAS to happen to get good work, so you might as well either square with it or consign yourself to the easy path of making frivolous trinkets."- Sparrow Salvage

Lace, silk, suri silk ribbon.

My next tinker session? I want to experiment with lace, textiles, ribbon. I hope to create layered textile pendants and wrist cuffs. I can't sew. Experimentation definitely required.

coffee stains

This is what half of my kitchen looked like a few days ago – my coffee-staining paper experiment (my husband noted that he gets in trouble for staining things with coffee). I’m working on a new look for my business, and I was going for the tea-stained paper effect for my earring hangtags (as inspired by things I’ve seen on pinterest and etsy).

Armed with Adrenaline Explosion coffee (for the fullest effect), I started to experiment. I do think I could be successful after further trials. However, I did not have craft paper, but classic crest, which really doesn’t absorb coffee with much effect. I did end up with slightly darker, warped paper and coffee on my griddle (which was serving a as a paper drying rack).

Hmmm... I have my doubts about this going through the printer.

Being the graphic designer that I am, I set about to create the look electronically (some day I will catch up to the collage paper artists I so admire – really sincerely, I am just not that talented when it comes to that kind of thing).

To the computer…
They now have stock photography for everything (really truly), I searched for tea-stained paper and landed on bigstockphoto.com. Refining my search for vintage paper, I settled on an image and paid my $4.99. I am pretty happy with what I came up with – I think it does make my jewelry look more expensive (yes?).



Oh – the nice edge – that is crayola pip-squeaks “small potatoes” brown. Courtesy of yours truly – there is at least one thing I can do by hand!

But as to the nitty-gritty, any of you with photoshop, here’s what I did.

1. make the background a layer by double clicking on it in the layers palette and naming it.
2. back off the opacity to 50% (my image was too dark). Having cropped it to the desired size,
3. create a layer effect of a light inner shadow, by using Inner Glow. Adding noise to your shadow keeps the grainy effect.

Settings for inner glow in photoshop.

If a paper effect is what you are looking for, but you don’t enjoy the nitty gritty, then here is a business card sized background (it is just a little bigger so that it bleeds off the edge) - enjoy!

Click first to open full size and then right click to download. This is printer resolution.