What I Did On My Summer Vacation

We're a little ways back into the year now -- and incidentally, this is the part I dislike, because no one has papers yet so there are almost no students, except for the panicked older students who are expected to use technology, but aren't being taught to use it.  The other day, M and I worked with a very nice gentleman.  She taught him to make capital letters on the computer.  I taught him how a printer works.  She taught him to use the mouse.

There is a lengthy diatribe on educational priorities in here somewhere, but I will limit myself: Did it ever occur to anyone to maybe require a computer-usage placement test?  It's seemed to me since high school, when I volunteered to drive some of my friends home after they missed the bus staying late in the computer lab, that the requirement of technology usage reinforces class distinctions in educational opportunity.  Clemson University requires that every student own a laptop -- and in my current still-a-bit-under-the-weather state I can't decipher whether this fixes or exacerbates the problem.

Anyway.

We've gotten started now, but before we did, M and I went to spend a couple of days in Asheville, North Carolina, where O. Henry lived for a while.  We went on the first day to Biltmore, the Vanderbilt family's estate.  After looking at the website, I came away with the impression that it was where rich people go to buy expensive branded wines and jellies and be rich together, but M's grandmother was kind enough to give us tickets and it was absolutely and completely worth the trip.

I've been to California's Hearst Castle, which is a melange of stuff imported over the Atlantic to build a fantasy Mediterranean village -- the architect called the style of that place something like "Franco-Anglo-Arabesque-Mediterranea-Japano-Rusko-screw-the-look-whatever-my-client-wants architecture."  Biltmore was a useful companion, since it is also a very Victorian-American estate -- appropriated spoils of empire and of education, combining in a large, somewhat asymmetrical cathedral-inspired house on top of a hill -- but Biltmore is much better-designed, and you can see how people would have flowed through it, both the guests and the downstairs class.  It's useful to see how the estate would harmoniously operate.

Also, some very inspiring wallpaper-decor combinations, including some beautiful examples of using rich jewel tones to make the very Victorian damask and tapestry feel masculine -- I'd give a photo, but they apparently never release them, contributing to my previous impression that it was a fancified wealth getaway -- and some wonderful 1890s-1900s clothing was on display, including a probably Worth-inspired gown and several pieces with delightful nostalgic touches that made my inner costumer dance.

Also, this fountain:


This view of the gardens (August is not a good time for gardens in the Carolinas, but these still looked pretty good):


And this carved marble pillar from the outside, which I'd love to "translate" into a jewelry design, somehow:


As for dining in town: The Jerusalem Garden Cafe is out of this world.  We ate there the first night and went back the second.  Try their curried mango shrimp -- it's delicate and warm, not spicy, and is served over perfect couscous.  It's atmospheric and lovely, especially the floor seating, and the servers are wonderfully attentive.  Asheville's more famous Tupelo Honey Cafe, however, was terrible and not worth the wait.  M's meal, the shrimp and grits, was drenched in hot sauce (not listed on the menu) and too spicy to eat; when we remarked on it, the server suggested stirring it around a bit.  Mine was a fried chicken something-or-other and was too salty to have more than a few bites.  However, if you still want to go, the peach rosemary lemonade is delicious.

Asheville can be described like this:  If you took a mellower version of the free-spiritedness and general artsy insanity of San Francisco and fused it with the prissy exclusivity of San Diego, their hipster love child would be Asheville (two silent E's.  And it went to North Carolina.  You've probably never heard of it).  The shopping is delightful -- don't miss the Spice and Tea Exchange, where they sell ras el hanout with black pepper and hibiscus flowers, and also onion-infused sugar and powdered extract of burgundy wine.  Malaprop's Bookstore is also a must-do -- we shopped a while and then sat drinking their amazing ginger lattes for hours.  And Woolworth Walk is not to be missed -- yes, there are all kinds of little art studios down by the river, but they were like an IRL Etsy, so you might as well visit through a screen -- and also overpriced and of questionable quality.  Woolworth Walk is right in town and features some truly amazing art -- pottery, installments, and traditional.  We purchased, or rather my parents purchased us through the magic of plastic and our birthdays coming up, a piece by Brenda Marks.  It's a three-dimensional giclee over wood rendition of her photo collage "Serenity."  Here's a picture of it on our wall, but visit her site because our lighting does it no justice:


Doesn't the dark luminous aqua balance the red so very eye-catchingly?  Stunning.

New favorite plants

So, in the past month, the milkweed has had an Osiris-esque cycle of death and rebirth.  The coleus ... coleuses ... colei? ... have doubled or tripled in size.  The Wandering Jew has reseeded itself in among the gladiolus.

And I've got a couple of new favorite plants (all images are courtesy the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at wildflower.org):


Tall Meadow Rue
Thalictrum dayscarpum
So this native beauty was unfortunately beheaded when our window box fell on it, but it seems to be doing okay as an abrupt low grower.  I love it not for the flowers, which haven't turned up yet on ours, but for the leaves, delicate little cress-shaped rounds that array themselves very gracefully around the tall stems.


Calico Aster
Symphyotricum lateriflorum
Another tall slender native wildflower with a graceful all-over leafing habit and interestingly hued herbal parts, and it seems to enjoy the hot weather.


Purslane spp.
I cannot recommend this plant enough for anyone in a high heat index climate.  It's not a native plant, but it's a well-behaved, low-maintenance ground grower.  Even in its pot, it seems to require no care at all beyond a splash of water now and then to produce gorgeous flowers and healthy, interesting foliage.  And it seems to absolutely love hot, dryish weather (dry being relative, of course; this is the South).  While everything else droops and has histrionics, our purslane -- we got a lacy double-blooming hybrid -- is shooting up by inches and throwing out romantic nickel-sized, canteloupe-hued, layered-petaled blooms.  Perfect for gardeners who like plants in the summer but also like to be inside where it's air-conditioned.

Two Musings

Available here.

1.) Somewhere, there is an earring civilization.  Venerable sterling elders with French hooks advise plastic clip-ons on how to raise their feather-and-kidney-wire young to be good and productive earring citizens.  Their mythology always seems to center around the quest to find one's soulmate, becoming a perfectly matched pair -- er, couple.

2.) I was reading an out-of-date travel magazine the other day while I waited for the laundry quarters to be spent, and there was an article about the memory triggers of smell.  This is something I often tell students about their papers -- scent is the single strongest memory trigger, you can tell me about how Grandma's house at Christmas looked for three pages, but if you add three lines at strategic intervals about how it smelled, you've doubled the narrative's force.  It's inspiring in that maddening way -- if only you could make jewelry of a smell.

I'll never forget the first time I stepped out of the airport in Charlotte.  The smell of the South is like nothing else, and describing it is as hard as putting into words that waxy, fleshy sheen of a salad-plate-sized magnolia blossom, or finding the perfect metaphor for the sound a cicada makes.  Think of clean water, freshly cut grass, and an assortment of fine cigars pristine, fragrant and unsmoked in their cedar box.

Yeah.  Like that.

The garden in mid-June: Coleus, native asters, thrift and liatris and rue.

This is how to make the next kudzu!

Running Bug Farm tipped me off to this from the beginning of the year:

The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto: What Now?

I read it with gentle skepticism for a while, because while I won't buy seedless watermelon if there's a seeded version available (it involves using chemicals to spawn haploid and quadruploid chromosomal watermelons, then crossing them to create the tetraploid fruit which is too genetically crippled to reproduce, hence no seeds in the little white jackets -- it scares me), I'm also open-minded on genetically engineered (GE) plants.  Yes, it can be bad, it can go wrong, it can pervert the entire drive of evolution like seedless watermelons, but -- I tend to think of genetic engineering as a super-speedy version of breeding and crossing strains to see what happens, which is a time-honored manner of adapting our environment to ourselves and ourselves to our environment.

Then I read on and saw what they're actually having approved: Herbicide-resistant alfalfa.

People.  We don't make herbicide-resistant plants.  I mean, I don't like herbicides.  But they need to work when we have no better option, for whatever reason, to get rid of a plant that's ecologically damaging a bunch of other plants.  That's why we have them.

This is why we can't have nice things.

This blog gives me joy.

City Farmer News.  Pay a visit.

Putting the means of production in the hands of the disenfranchised through training and education.  Using simple technologies in ingenious ways to create permaculture.  Reusing and repurposing everything to carve out a space for living things to thrive.  Devising a way for humans to coexist with the necessities of life in a manner both pleasant and functional.

It's like the best sort of Utopian steampunk fiction, only it's news, with bylines and ledes and captioned photos.  And it makes me go, "Hey -- maybe the world is gonna be okay after all."

Steampunk Skills

In my heart, I still really prefer a steampunk that is a lot more "punk" than "steam."


Available here.

I don't think that things need to be dripping in gears (or octopi) to be steampunk.  The "purist" view is that it's not steampunk unless it's functional; I'm not sure I ascribe to that either.  I like the William Morris standpoint on the technology vs. aesthetic thing: "Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful or feel to be beautiful."  To me, it naturally follows that either is good but both is best.

Nor is steampunk just a "look" to me, though there's definitely some level of know-it-when-I-see-it going on here with the clothing and accessories.  As an iteration of punk, it's a mindset and an aesthetic.

Primarily, the mindset is characterized by the oft-calligraphied Japanese phrase "onkochishin": "Honor the past to create the new."  It's a looking backwards to solve the evils of now and recreate the present; it's looking at the world and saying, "You know?  We don't have to break this to remake it.  We can have science and responsibility and wonder.  They can become the same thing again.  We can save the world by changing our ways, not by eschewing them."

(Please allow me a moment to be a Lord of the Rings fanatic: "He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of reason," Gandalf advised us.  And while Papa Tolkien is no doubt revolving in his grave to have me say it:  That applies to the technological lifestyle too.  We don't have to destroy either the ways of the past or the ways of now to understand them, nor to improve them.)

The steampunk culture looks to the past and incorporates it in order to celebrate it  -- which is almost universal; the only reason it's settled on neo-Victorian is because that's where/when our society's cultural memory says, "This is when science and beauty and romance and heroism and practicality could all be realistic concepts at the same time."  It's really not about a particular time period.  It's about recreating the useful and the beautiful in one another's image to create a world that both looks and works well.

This isn't to say there isn't harsh, gritty steampunk alongside the elegant gleam.  The wisdom of the culture lies not in its settings but in its meanings -- in what it takes as its heroes.

Consequently, while I can't mod my technology and I don't drive a steam-powered hovercraft, these are the things I consider my "steampunk skills":

Jewelry Sets and Busy-ness

I've become a lot bolder about listing coordinating items separately of late.  My bridal jewelry all links to the rest of the collection in the listing, since those are intended to be sort of infinitely mix-and-match.  Lately, I also listed this set:



Available here and here. Sold!

That ... is a weird piece.  I have to say it.  It's really odd.  Even more disparate materials than I usually combine, which, with me, is saying something.  It would be awesome to layer with a longer piece, though, a pendant on a very long cord maybe?  I haven't done a lot of A.) chokers or B.) multistrand before, though I've done a good few of the latter lately.

And I'm fond of the earring photo; I think I managed the depth of field and dimensionality, what with turning the pot that the earrings hang in toward the light and away from the camera, which makes them a little more interesting.  Not sure it's visible at the teaser size, though.  Hmm.

Also, since I originally wrote this post, the set has sold.  Obviously I'm not the only one who likes it!

I always consider jewelry sets to be an excellent gift -- coordinating necklace-earrings, bracelet-pendant, pendant-earrings-bracelet or what-have-you vastly increases the perceived value.  However, I'm getting more confident about breaking up jewelry sets listing-wise because I often sell them that way in person, with someone wanting just the necklace but not having pierced ears, preferring studs, or not caring for the pendant but liking the color combination and so purchasing the matching bracelet alone.  Things like that.  It's only twenty cents more for me, and it takes my customers to the Priority-shipping upgrade faster, so I think this is actually better.  Thoughts from the reader pool?

On another note, we've just finished out the semester at the tech college, and in the sudden glut of free time and M-is-home time I've had a couple of stupidly productive days.  We're still decorating the house, the garden flourishes, and I made hamburgers with homegrown spinach on them last night.  The Japanese maple looks like the Japanese maple.  The English primrose and daisies are not terribly happy, which is not unexpected, but my Oscar milkweed, liatris, and (shockingly) trout lilies are all remarkably happy.  The Jack-in-the-pulpit died but it's been the only thing to croak out of season so far.  More topically, I've made approximately a thousand charm bracelets, two with bits of miniature tea set and three with buttons, including my weird but somehow trademark combination of plastic buttons with pearls. We're discussing having all our work friends over for traditional British tea and jewelry-showing sometime next month. 

For those interested, I'm selling off much of my collection of vintage hematite in the Ballet Llama storefront.  There are also some nice hard-to-find charms there.  Get 'em while the getting's good!

It's hot, but life is nice right now.

Outdated links from the blogosphere

I hate the word "blogosphere."  (Ooh, end-of-sentence scare quotes.  And in my head, my own voice saying something I say every day: In American English, periods and commas always go inside quotation marks unless there's a parenthetical in the way.  You will occasionally see this done differently; that generally means the source is British, because the international rule is different.  It's weird spending your day teaching rules you regard as a little dumb.  At some point I must post the list of grammar rules I would be happy to help kill).  I'm hereby inventing the word "bloggerverse."

Anyway.  The links, covering recentish opinions in technology, academics, :

Ian Bogost's post "The Turtlenecked Hairshirt", being a discussion of the ivory-tower nature of academia which amused me highly and lit a fire under my rounded tail as to seriously thinking about a paper on gender and sexuality in Echo Bazaar.  I'm not sure I'd go so far as to unreservedly agree with his stated premise, though I believe him to be deliberately exaggerating, but his apocalyptic language reminds me of one of my deeply-held beliefs: The humanities spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel because each sub-discipline invents its separate, insular jargon.  For someone with training in Comparative Literature to attempt to approach anthropological ethnography, for someone with a sociologist's education to attempt to analyze the obscure greats of Renaissance drama, results in a lot of headache, heartache and "bridge theory" that is roundly denigrated by an endless legion of theoretical purists.

Lindy West's pleasingly well-reasoned anger after a rather thoughtless but not ill-intentioned moment from estimable sex columnist Dan Savage.  The whole debate is well worth The Stranger's nauseatingly ridiculous load times, because they both make great cases.  I am personally of the opinion that the U.S. uses food as a way to displace and/or extend our oddly Puritanical relationship with sex.  Think about the phrase "guilty pleasure."  Porn?  Or cheesecake?  Slut shaming and shock at teen sexting and obsession with celebrity affairs seems to me to go hand in hand with condescending diet ads and horror of minors who fail to be delicate-waiflike-and-breastless and our fascination with eating disorders.  Consider the fact that walking into a primarily-female workplace (like, sadly, my writing center) will eventually involve listening to one of our peculiarly American social rituals: The expression of efforts to avoid the fat-and-lazy taboo, commisseration over how hard it is to feel that we are indeed avoiding the taboo, the offering of advice to use various forms of asceticism in order to avoid a taboo which each feels is threatening her every day.  Think about this.

For the record, I wear a 20, 22 or 24 depending on brand.  M is less of an extreme hourglass and is generally a 20.  She's the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on.  I thought so when I met her in person the very first time: "She's much bigger than I expected," I thought, and also, "She's stunning."  I've found two brands of jeans that fit me very well.  I occasionally wish that my size were distributed differently (which varies from "God, I wish my belly would just go away" to "What the hell is with my long torso and short limbs?" to "God, I wish I didn't have such a disproportionately small waist; no one makes trousers with this much waist tailoring" -- yes, seriously).  I enjoy growing my own food, I enjoy preparing it, I enjoy serving it, I enjoy eating it, and I consider this a far greater pleasure than being able to buy pants in multiple brands.  I will worry about my size when I can no longer bend double to mulch my snow pea vines, or walk around the apartment complex or the nearby woods on a nice afternoon as M and I often do.  Furthermore, if I dropped ten pounds I wouldn't cry.  If I dropped ten sizes?  I'd cry.  Because I would no longer find myself attractive.  I like big women.  I like big men.  I dislike people who dress inappropriately or with poor fit.  And if others have the right to say they think my ass is unsightly, then I also get to say this:  I find drawn faces masklike and unattractive.  I find visible ribs repulsive.  And would I say this to people who exhibit these features?  No, because I have a level of gentility and sensitivity and their unsightly thinness has no effect on me.

Also, go read the introduction to The Omnivore's Dilemma for a lot of interesting information, including this jewel: The French food culture is heavily, heavily based on cheeses.  Cheeses.  Now talk to me about the French obesity epidemic and how much worse than the U.S. it is.  I'm waiting.

And now that you're either suitably depressed, suitably enraged, or suitably disgusted (hey, it's up to you!), one more, cheerier link:

An interview selection from my latest Mother Earth News email newsletter featuring the proprietors of Green Heron Tools, which makes ergonomic agricultural tools for women.  It's an interesting discussion of the necessity of acknowledging physical difference as a necessary step to full gender equality -- though I'd love to see some throwaway lines (one day, somewhere) about the role that society plays in "biological" difference between genders, I'm very impressed with the interviewees and their social consciousness.

Treasury Wednesday: Bright, Bright, Bright!

The brights of my garden inspired this one, and thinking about the fact that I've never owned chalcedony because the colors vary so much that I never know it when I see it. It contains some really unusual items, not my normal sort of thing, so I thought it was worth posting on the blog.

'The Garden of Chalcedonies' by tangopig

Aqua and red and pink and orange. Inspired by the flowers sprouting in my garden and the brilliant candy shades of chalcedony.

little handmade dol... variation $13.00	Original Fairy Flow... mermaidglass $14.00	Pink Rose on Bright... bedbuggs $24.00	Turquoise and Red F... larsandaddie $60.00
Setting Sun Embroid... TheSadaAbeExpe... $25.00	Wonderfully Intense... luckyloulou $14.00	bright magical gard... dylandogleash $26.00	Coral Ribbon Neckla... twillypopgirl $12.00
Aqua Red Hibiscus B... skeptis $28.00	Chloe's Classic... ChloesCollars $22.00	Paint Chip - The Or... KnockKnocking $65.00	MAGNESITE TURQUOISE... gabeadz $39.00
Tapestry Tote with ... carolleighhand... $88.00	A Dozen Dahlias flo... smilesandsquig... $4.00	Peaceful- 8x10 Prin... themiscellany $18.00	Elegant Sex Appeal ... Allofyou $31.00

Treasury tool is sponsored by Lazzia.com A/B image testing.

"Bless my eyes! Fresh hot ... "

Not leftover, but definitely lazy.  As of mid-February I now bake all of the bread for our household.

I am a big fan of food that I can make ahead of time and have last a while; I'm happiest when I can have one big, traditional, flour-coated apron-wearing "baking day" and then have homemade food to serve and eat for several days.

When I was doing my last quarter of school with my double-schedule-and-a-job-and-a-commute nightmare, weekends were a respite, sort of.  I spent them engaged in computer games (I still own, play and love my legacy neighborhood in The Sims 2, where a number of refugees from great works of literature, like Aldonza and Sancho, Count Fosco and Marian Halcombe, Bess and her eponymous Highwayman, have bred and interbred and I now have their grandchildren populating my pixellated dollhouses.  Awesome and absorbing time sink).  But weekends weren't actually relaxing as such.  They were just -- two days when I didn't actually have to drive forty-five minutes to do six to nine unbroken hours of punishing mental work and then drive home in rush-hour traffic to scribble and pound out my homework until I fell into bed.

On a related note, I tend to get a bit steamy when people are vocal about thinking that college students are, as a breed, lazy.

Now, weekends are different.  In my own home, with my workspace set up and control over the grocery list, weekends are glorious timeless stretches of beading and baking interspersed with five-dollar DVDs from Ingles, snuggling with Megan, drinking moderate amounts of sweet froofy martinis, and lovely-anxiously tending my garden.

Anyhow.  This all started with the bread.

As an example, I spent last Saturday preparing the following:
1. Fresh artisan bread
2. Miniature mushroom quiches
3. Caramel nut sticky buns
4. Artichoke cheese dip
5. Corn and bean salad
6. Apple cider pasta salad

Each a family recipe -- except the bread.  And oh god the bread.  M and I have never agreed upon a type of bread, but I am pleased to report those days well over.

The recipe, from Mother Earth News and written in this delightful vintage-advert tone, is here.  Read it.  Use it.  Love it.  The pizza peel and baking stone are not necessary; parchment paper on a cookie sheet works just fine.  The bread is moist and tangy with a delicious sourdough-like texture and flavor.  One orange-sized ball yields a loaf large enough for both of us to get crusty, satisfying sandwiches and dip the heels in jam or artichoke dip or plain cream cheese for a flavorful snack.  I've learned I need to do a spare loaf that we can eat warm.  Without butter.  That's how good this bread is.

We've figured out that all the bread costs us about $5 a month to make, and takes about half an hour's work once a week.

So.  For no particular reason.  Have a special offer.  When you mention that one blog post about the bread between now and Monday, March 28, 2011, get 10% off any purchase of $20.00 or more.


Available here.

M has just awarded me a Housewife Merit Badge.  She assures me that they are in fact equilateral triangles like Girl Scout patches.  Success!

Gardening Again

So, after all that, we got to the garden center and the all-purple-and-green idea went immediately out the window. It's still all in shades-of-aqua pots, anyway, ranging from muted to quite saturated indeed and from seafoam to robin's-egg to stone flecked with blue ... but the colors, man, the colors. They tempted us far too much.

I also made the amateur's mistake of planting two months early.  Our average date of last frost here, apparently, is April 15.  "Well, hell," I said to the computer screen, and started tucking vintage army blankets around the plants every night.

They're under shelter.  I don't think anything has died.  They just marked time until the soil warmed up.  And they got a nice soaking from our major thunderstorm last week!

In our most sheltered corner, we have a young Japanese maple (a Suminagashi) and three specimens of an apricot-colored viola cultivar. These are an annual, so next year I may replace them with a threatened-endangered Southeastern viola species.  This is the corner at the beginning of February:


This is it now:


I've added pots of spinach and basil, moved the ephemerals (the little brown pots, about which more later) to the railing because they seemed to want to be warmer, the creeping phlox has gone from pink to purple, and that ornamental grass is much happier.  Up in the corner waiting to be hung, the hummingbird feeder we bought for five dollars at the Mennonite thrift shop, its missing parts replaced with polymer clay and beads.

The tree is promising to bud any ol' time now; it's mulched with Spanish moss and the pot contains one of M's polymer clay fairy doors.

I got my native-woodland spring ephemerals, which, to my shock and delight, are available cheaply, if in limited varieties, at Lowe's of all places. I now have my liverleaf hepatica, a red trillium, and a trout lily in individual pots.


Liverleaf, Hepatica nobilis or H. americana. Photo copyright Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

It seems those fuzzy stems have lovely deep red winter foliage.


Trillium, Trillium erectum. Photo copyright Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.
I'm not sure that's the right species. I thought mine was a T. grandiflorum, but apparently those only come in white aging to pink, and I seem to recall mine will be deep red. These also have the really delightful and ephemeral-appropriate name of "wakerobin." This is one of those moments where my writer's acquisitiveness of names shines through into a jewelry design idea: Expect a Yellow Wakerobin Necklace or similar in my future.


Trout lily, Erythronium americanum. Photo copyright Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

The turned-back petals are lovely! Though apparently not actually characteristic.

Apart from this, we have a white astilbe (apparently pronounced "a still bee," not "a steel bay" as I've been), which we purchased because we liked it and it was non-invasive -- but which apparently is a show cultivar of a native Appalachian False Goat's-beard. Accidental success! The astilbe is going mad with delight where it's planted, which is worth recalling for the future.  Between the two astilbes is a jack-in-the-pulpit, also a woodland native:


Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Arisaema triphyllum. Photo copyright Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

Or rather, this is what I thought.  When the sprouts came up a couple weeks ago, the distinctive leaf shapes indicated I had the trillium in the box with the astilbes and the jack-in-the-pulpit on our glass-topped table ... oops. Either way, the jack-in-the-pulpit is in one of the two sunnier spots to encourage those bold burgundy stripes to develop.



There's also a box of lavender and a box of peas, out of sight, and a big pot of "Firecracker" gladiolus, the one with the cool stick in it. Which is native to nowhere. But also noxious nowhere, so I'm still okay.  There's one sprout, abruptly and at long last; it liked the thunderstorm.

In addition, there's a non-invasive planting by the railing of cilantro, primrose and English daisy:


Lovely!

All those deep reds and oranges are going to be splendid against the shaded aquas, especially as the plants further mature, so I have high hopes!

I dream in black and burgundy

My customer's wedding was at the end of February, so time to show off the jewelry I made for her party!

Her earrings, wire-wrapped 14k gold fill with a hand-brushed finish.  I'd never actually done a brushed finish, so I allowed myself an hour or two to devote to learning the technique on inexpensive wire, and purchased a nice fine wire brush and file set.  I soon discovered that: (a.) it's really easy, and (b.) five minutes and a sanding block works better and looks better.  We live and learn.



I'm contemplating making up a tutorial for those.  Look for it at the beginning of April!

The bracelets were three-strand Bordeaux Swarovski pearl and black onyx with pewter toggle clasps and silver-plated charms made of crystal pearls with bead caps.
Lessons learned here:
(a.) Get the wrist measurements before ordering the supplies -- I think this customer may have gone handmade partly because she couldn't find anything ready-made to fit her very small bridesmaids.  I have a bunch of extra pearls.  But this is okay because I also learned:
(b.) Allow "wiggle room" in your pricing for stuff to sell out two minutes before you place your order.  That is not the originally planned clasp.  And I had to get the 6mm pearls much more expensively from Beadaholique when Fire Mountain Gems sold out of them since they were having a sale.
The clasp: an adventure.  I highly recommend this shop and this one for supplies; neither of them were selling multiples of the clasp, but they were both very prompt in telling me so!

I couldn't resist doing "vintage" styled shots of the jewelry.  This is the "winter" version, styled with browned leaves of flowering kale -- I desaturated, soft-focused and upped the dynamic color range for a sense of time and nostalgia:



And here's the "warmer" version, half-sepia-filtered, graduated-tinted, and soft-focused after styled with a litter of the deadheads from my apricot violas, for a sense of nostalgia, the warm blush of the beautiful and impermanent:


Pruning makes for great props. Also, I definitely want to do some more sanding of metal for the nice matte finish. 

The total of the jewelry was five bracelets and a pair of earrings: all in all, a good-sized commission, though if I hadn't been custom-sizing each one and thus redesigning a little, I'd have naturally gone stark raving mad on bracelet four.  But as it was, getting the same design with varying wrist sizes was an interesting challenge.  Much fun!

I am starting a new blog tradition.

Blogadition? Blogition? Webdition?

From now on, barring acts of God, general outcry, or boredom, I think I shall establish a little thing called Treasury Wednesday.  I've found a great tool for treasury posting, and I love sharing these things, and I spend way way too much time making them, so why not?


This one is all about spring ephemerals.

'Spring Ephemerals' by tangopig

Spring ephemerals -- like dwarf vernal irises, liverleaf hepatica, trillium, some anemones and others, depending on your area -- are the first food source for bees in the spring, but are often threatened by invasive non-native plant species. Planting them in gardens may be a key to saving our honeybee population. Flowers and early insects in shades of delicate pink, purple and blue!

SilkOrigamiButterfl... SewSmashing $18.00	Spring Flower Trio ... serena29 $9.00	Orchid Mist-Nuno Fe... amysfunkyfiber... $79.00	Springtime Cafetier... IronStitchWard... $8.00
Purple Blackberries... ShebboDesign $40.00	Flowers, Stripes an... rabbitwhiskers $185.00	SPRING SALE Lady Si... SamanthaSultan... $55.00	30% OFF SALE - Larg... AmeliaKayPhoto... $37.80
Butterfly embellish... firefly1505 $2.75	Hebrew Scrabble til... poemweave $8.95	Hollywood romantic ... NoMoreTwistHan... $60.00	Eco friendly spring... KajaDesign $250.00
full bloom v05 wate... fromyou2me $10.00	PURPLE Organza Flow... MissGlory $14.00	Beginning of Time, ... artcanbefun $45.00	girly bumble, a sug... ORphotography $19.00

Treasury tool is sponsored by Lazzia.com.

It seemed like a good one to start the tradition with this treasury, since this is about when the ephemerals should be starting to bloom (though I made it in January ... and mine still aren't showing much, which according to the packaging may be the case until year 2 ... but more on the garden later).

The color scheme is all bi pride colors with a dash of green. Because, y'know, why not? Bisexuality is, sadly, often attacked by both the gay and straight communities; like transpeople, bisexuals are thought by one side to be promiscuous and confused and by the other to be promiscuous, confused and mucking up the "True Gay Cause." Next time you're on a cruise ship or at a conference which has a "friends of Dorothy" meetup listed someplace -- "friends of Dorothy" is code for "queers gather here" -- look to see if there's a "friends of friends of Dorothy" listing somewhere nearby. If so, that's where all the transgendered, genderqueer, bisexual, asexual and pansexual people will be hanging out -- and sometimes, talking about how sad and frustrating it is that outside-the-box gender-sexualities are so "boxed."

This concludes your PSA social justice lesson for the month. Enjoy the pretty flowers!

Oh, and on a happier note, there's more about spring ephemerals here.