Making Jewelry - A New Phase

Beads!  Feldspar, Aquamarine, Jasper and Lapis Lazuli.

I decided to start tackling a very hard and emotional job today.  It seems a good thing to do while snowed in from Snowzilla / Snowmageddon.  The job is to start going through all the inventory from my on-hiatus jewelry business, and deciding what to do with it.

Although "on hiatus" is not really accurate ... the business, as a business, is closed.

I started making jewelry as a hobby, and like so many, my hopes expanded to selling the best pieces online and at craft fairs.  More than anything I wanted to *share* what I had created.  But making quality jewelry is expensive, and the best way to make sure I had enough money to buy supplies was to see if I could sell some of my pieces and turn enough of a profit to make more jewelry.  I was encouraged by supportive family members to try a business. 

One of the sets I made with sterling
silver, Swarovski crystal, pearl,
blue chalcedony, and jasper.

And for a few years, it worked, if only just.  It was always a small business, barely scraping by, but it allowed me to create some lovely things, and I hope, make their owners very happy.  But, things have changed.  This was originally a two-person business, and my partner has moved on to other callings and endeavors.  The business was never really set up to be something just one person could handle.  So I'm going to take the business, such as it is, into its next "phase."  I'd rather say that then to imagine my beloved business completely coming to an end.  But pretty soon I'm going to have to face facts.  The business license has not been renewed, and I doubt the Etsy store will ever have cause to reopen. 

I am not up to the stress of dealing with all the paperwork, shipping, craft shows, and such, alone, as well as dealing with all the aspects of supply / design / create.  So I need to dramatically pare down the inventory and obligations into something I can manage on my own.  I still hope to create jewelry for friends, gifts, and maybe a bit of custom work.  But it won't be a business anymore - instead, it is going back to being a hobby.

A mug with the store
logo - Lunar Blue Designs.

So, back to the sorting through stuff.  My partner sent me all of her supplies - boxes and boxes of stuff - including loose beads, earring holders, display table linens, findings, cords, and so much more.  I need to decide what to do with it all.  All of my inventory, and all of hers, needs to be sorted through, and I need to decide what I'm still going to use for occasional jewelry making, what I'm going to sell off, and what I'm going to have to give away.  Then I have to go through packing it all up, getting auctions listed for all the lots, and then shipping it all off.

Many people have had to do this, of course.  Still, I'm very sad about it.  Seeing part of your past come to a close, something that was a creative endeavor close to your heart, is tough.  But I'm trying to be as positive as I can.  I will still be making jewelry when I can find a bit of time to do so.  And years of working in a business has really 'upped my game.'  My pieces are professionally made and of the highest quality.  I am proud of my work.

It has also opened some doors to combine my hobbies of quilling and jewelry into gemstone and paper creations.  I hope to explore more "quilled jewelry" designs and possibilities as time goes on.

And if you are a beaded gemstone jeweler too, you might make out with quite a deal!  After I get through the inventory I'll be posting a number of large lots for sale on Ebay.  So if you are looking for beads at basement prices, it will be something really worth checking out!

Well, back to the piles o stuff!  They ain't gonna sort themselves ... to bad about that :)

Image Credits:  All my pix of all my stuffs

Getting Into the Swing Again!

Blue Flowers - What I do when I
don't know what to quill ...

After almost three months of being too swamped with chronic illness and general life craziness to be able to quill or blog, I'm finally back into it!  Thanks for sticking with me through my hiatus at the end of last year.

I returned, and after much digging through email, I found an email from another quiller asking me to change the name of my blog.  I considered this very carefully, and decided it was the most appropriate thing to do.

So here we are at the new blog site, Stories, Stones, and Spirals!  I hope you like it here, and choose to follow the blog.  I still have a lot of work to do, changing all the pointers at DeviantArt and Craftsy to point to the new blog.  I'm kind of dreading going through my DD account, because I know I've missed so much!  I hate it when life/illness or whatever keeps me away from my blogs and favorite sites for an extended period of time.  Getting back into it can be so painful.

I hope all your projects have been going well!  I'm always looking to brighten my day with beautiful quilling, so if you have a blog or twitter account you think I should follow, let me know!

Happy Quilling!

Quilled Lotus Flower Earrings with Pearls

Of course, while I was supposed to be working on dragon, I was instead taking breaks to quill other things.  I always find myself doing this ... I just can't stay focused on a single craft project at one time.  I always have multiple projects in the works.  I'm going to chalk it up to my ADD, which certainly helps one be creative, but can interfere with staying on task sometimes.

Anyway, I got the urge to make lotus flowers, even though I've never done it before.  I have a lot of books on meditation, many of them with different depictions of lotus flowers on the cover.  I decided to do something simple, and used a five petal design to mimic the flower.  To add some depth to them I used pearlized paper in two colors for each of the petals.  So the colors are white/grey, blue/green, and pink/lilac.  You can see the colors better in the inset images.

The pearl paper gave me the idea of making earrings using Swarovski pearls.  I make a lot of gemstone jewelry, and this seemed like a perfect way to use the flowers.  Except for that post I wrote earlier where I said I don't like to make quilled jewelry.  Well, I'm eating my words, here.

So I added an open circle to the bottom of each flower and used that to attach color coordinated Swarovski pearls in pink, purple, and white.  All the findings are silver or silver toned.  I really like the way they came out, very light and graceful.  I used a great deal of acrylic spray on them, hoping they will be able to stand up to some wear.  Now I just have to choose which pair I'm going to keep and which I'm giving away.

Image Credit:  My pix of my own quilling work, designs by me.

Work in Progress - Dragon, Update Two

A view of dragon from the last
update - neck filled in.

As I blogged previously, my current "large" project is a dragon. I've been working on it and then putting it off and quilling other things (iterate) for quite some time now, but it is beginning to come together. Here's another update on dragon's status.

Lower half of body with
red and blue outline on the
upper half, and orange spines.

I had filled in the neck and then used the yellow underbelly quills to help me guide filling in the first half of the body.  It was tricky, since I was stubbornly holding to the idea that I wanted all the green teardrop shapes to be the same size (more or less) and point the same way.  So getting around the curves took some planning and a bit of forming (and shoving) of the quills into place.

Then I noted that my drawing had outlines of both red and blue.  So using single strips I lined the upper side of the body.  The effect is subtle, not thick like in the line drawing, but I think it works just fine.  You can see this effect better in the second picture, where the lower half of the body is completed.

Dragon foot!  With claws!

The spines were really a pain. As in the line drawing, I wanted them to be orange with blue on the outside, just as I had colored them in.  So I glued strips of orange and blue together and started rolling.  Each of the spines is a different size, and is curved in its own unique way.  So there was no other method to follow but to keep experimenting with different lengths of strips, rolling them up and seeing if they could be made to fit any of the spines.  I started to get a feel for it after a while, and ended up making all the spines at once, and holding them aside for use as I made each body part later.

Two thirds of a dragon -
just needs three more legs
and of course a face :)

After that, the end bit of the tail was pretty straightforward, lining up green teardrop quills, and then lining the piece with blue and red.  The next tricky part was the foot.  How was I going to quill the feet?  Fill them in with tight circles?  I just didn't like the idea.  Seemed too 'heavy.'  I wanted something more lacy and more stylized.  Eventually I realized what I really wanted was something simple, and used open circles for the whole foot, and then tiny little teardrops for the claws.

Next update for dragon will hopefully show the finished piece!  I'm working just ahead of when these updates are posting, and so am pushing to have dragon all done by the end of the month.  And maybe, just maybe, dragon will be submitted to a contest ...

Image Credit:  My pix of my dragon.