USB flowers

Your humble blogger is currently learning how to solder and make bezels. This doesn't make for great photography-filled blog posts for several reasons. First, the torch I was using was running out of gas and wasn't very hot. Somehow, this led to me eventually melting through one of my bezels because I got bored of swirling the flame around the ring and must have kept it in place for too long. It was not pretty.

At that point, I wanted to ask my teacher for help, but she was assisting her assistant, who had accidentally spilled fifties or hundreds of dollars worth of silver grain onto the floor. Eventually, I started asking people who looked bored for assistance. One very helpful person became a little too helpful and then finished my bezel for me. That could have been worthy of photographing, but even though I did part of the soldering, I didn't feel like I had actually made the bezel. I put it in the pickle to clean it up, and then forgot it there. Oops. Thus, no photos.

On the other hand, holiday shopping and fear of absurdly luxurious and/or crowded shopping areas has led me to a lot of online window shopping. I like gardening a lot, so I think this tulip USB hub is quite cute. I'm not sure it would be as cute with things actually plugged into the ports, but I guess that's another issue altogether.

lace leaf droplet necklace

I'm trying to make new items for the shop, so I can update it daily. This has proven to be pretty challenging, but still kind of gratifying. I seem to find that every new piece becomes my new favorite! Fickle, I know.

I had this silver crochet leaf lounging about for awhile. I had thought that I would somehow combine it with the sapphire beads from the mobile earrings below, but it didn't seem quite right. After a month or so of hanging out, the leaf started to lightly oxidize and became copper-colored on the edges. I thought it matched nicely with these chalcedony briolettes, so I put this necklace together.

prototypes

A few months ago, I decided that I wanted to make earrings that were like tiny mobiles. I set about making a prototype and ended up with the mobile above. It was a little too long and with a little bit too many elements, but was still cute. I hung it from a potted plant on top of my dresser and let it marinate for awhile.

Recently, I decided to work on them again. I used sterling silver wire, substituted out the glass beads for tiny cut sapphires, and worked on the balance. I came up with the tiny mobile earrings at left, and am thinking about other styles. I think it would be cute to use different beads to hang from the mobile arms, like heart shaped briolettes or ovals, or weld on shapes cut from sheet metal.

I have pretty short hair, but I'm guessing if you have long hair, you might want to wear it up with these earrings unless you want to end up with a mobile tangle.