Jewelry artist falls off the face of the earth

No, not really. (Although she might want to at times). 

I've just been a bit overwhelmed.  Turns out trying to do full time work in 20 hours a week is a bit hard.  Plus, I've been busy chasing these:

Work life balance is a little hard to achieve.  At least for me.  I don't want to work full time, since my little sweeties are still so small.  Not that small, I guess.  Eleven months old now!  Where did the time go.  Where are my tiny tinies?!  They're walking!  Of course they are.  Walking at 10.5 months!  It seems really early and I can't help wishing that they had stayed babies a bit longer. I probably won't have anymore, so I feel a bit cheated that I won't get a second go around at the sweet tiny baby part pf parenthood.

Well, on the studio front I've just been working away:

And as I am taking the above picture, out in the front yard:

 LOL LOL LOL.  I have two very dramatic babies.  They're hilarious.

And this was a really fun project for a lovely lady in Rhode Island (a place I've never been, but have always wanted to visit):

I really just love the way I attached the palladium bezel.  It makes me want to remake my own ring!

I have a couple of new things that I'm trying to finish and add to the shop, but extra time is a bit thin on the ground here. :-(  I also have a bit of $$ from recycling all of my polishing sweeps for the last 4 years and I'm trying to decided what new equipment to buy.  Maybe a ring stretcher/compressor?  I really want to get a bead blaster, I love that texture.  AND, I got some stuff that will blacken gold, so I am SO EXCITED to try that out.  But I need the time.  TIME TIME, whose got the time!?

Not me, obviously.  I haven't even posted to my blog in a thousand years....  I think I am going to try to post every week.  We'll see how it goes.  haha.

Sometimes you have a project where everything seems to go wrong wrong wrong

Are there any of you out there that experience this?  It seems like certain projects are just cursed, and bad things just keep happening, one thing after another until the project is ruined.  Or finished, after much cursing.  I swear, at least once a year I will have a project that makes me want to throw myself off of a bridge.  I've either miscalculated how much it will cost to make, or underestimated by like a million hours how long it will take to make (or both! which is always fabulous).  Or while I'm in the middle of the project, things will just keep going wrong.  Well, I had the perfect storm of a project and it combined the best elements of all three of these things.  Seriously made me want to just give up and get a desk job.  What a nightmare.  If they hadn't been for a lovely repeat customer who I really like I would have given up and sent a refund (which I have never before done). 

And then I had a couple of pieces of casting not turn out, so I had to remake them.

Giant pit, right in the bezel.  The other one was the same metal and had a giant pit, right in the same spot.  That is where the sprue was.


Things just seem to be going wrong all over the place.  And I'm being attacked by spiders.

This is the THIRD giant terrifying spider that I've found in the studio.  Maybe it was the same one, I did catch the first one and let it go down at the bottom of the yard (and by letting go I mean flinging into the bushes from the jar he was trapped in), perhaps he came back for revenge? (From being rescued from my sink?)  I let this one go too, although I got super shivers from catching it.  I took a video of it moving around, but I don't want to horrify people.  Ugh. I don't mind spiders generally, but when they're this big....

And I finally got a hair cut after a year and it's terrible.  I have triangle hair now, it's horrible.  I feel like I need to go out and buy some acid washed mom jeans with pleats.  The worst part is, it was finally starting to look good and now I have to start over.  And my hair grows SO SLOWLY.  And my stylist is usually awesome, so I don't even know what happened.

I'm really hoping that things will start improving soon.  I'm not sure if I can take being in a deep gray funk already, and it's only September.  How will I make it through the winter?

LOL. LOL.

The horrible, no good, very bad week.

Dearest readers,

I had a pretty terrible week last week.  Nothing bad happened, no one died.  It was more of a "I didn't win the lottery" sort of bad, rather than "all of my money has been stolen" sort of bad.  But still pretty bad, for me at least.

Friday morning I got an unexpected email from my wonderful, sparkling, cupcakes and cotton candy, unicorns and pink kittens nanny.  It was terrible.  She quit!  She quit!  Effective that next Monday.  What did these little stinkers do to make her quit?!?!  Why!? WHY?

She had had a friend who recommended her for a job at a school, and the lady who was doing the hiring happened to know her and offered her the job right away.  And mandatory training started that next Monday.  So, it sucked for me and my whole life was turned upside down.  It's sort of hard to get any work done when you have two 8 month babies who have decided that now is a great time to start crawling.  Things are still crazy.  I'm happy for her, but disappointed that we no longer have her as our fabulous nanny.

And then, I was trying to get this rush order out last Thursday, and I was checking the diamond in the setting before I got ready to starting cutting the seat and it fell onto the ground and bounced by my toe and vanished.  Just disappeared.  Seriously.  I was all, no problem, it's some where.  It can't just disappear.  30 minutes of searching later I call in the Shop Monkey to help me....nothing.  I am just envisioning having to buy a new stone.  Tears, people.  Tears.

And then, for the 5th time, I check this one spot with a metal pokey tool and there it is.  Let me show you:

It was wedged into that little space in the last photo.  I was about to pull my hair out when I finally found it. 

And then:

EEEEEEK!

Don't worry, I practice catch and release.  OMG, still creeped out.  And there was another one, later, on the floor.  I hope I'm not going to get eaten.

This week is starting out better than last week, I hope everything works out with the new nanny.  It's fewer hours than I had before, which isn't fantastic.  The babies like her though, and that's important.  They are so awesome right now.  They're both so fast and funny, I love it. 

Cheese and Rice, it took me long enough.

Man, I have been plagued (PLAGUED!) by bad photographs since I moved out of my sweet industrial studio with the south facing windows last summer.  I swear I haven't taken a good photograph since June of 2012.  But I think I have finally figured it out (HALLELUJAH!).  Except, of course, for the random kitty hairs all over the stump that I like to use.  (Have I mentioned that I hate cats?  Ours especially?  I'm kidding.  No, I'm not.  I despise them.  Kidding.  No, really, I can't wait until they run away.  I joke!  No.  Really.)


So, that ring on the far left isn't white gold with a weird tint.  It's 14kt green gold, which is super nice in person, but I'm having some trouble capturing the color.  It is sort of a spring yellow, lighter and whiter than regular 14kt yellow gold, but not really green.  I like it.  It's fresh looking.  That's my new ring too!  I think I'm going to call it my French Wedding ring.  It seems sort of antique to me.  All right, I have to go squeeze my babies, so this is it for my blog post.  I am so relieved to finally be able to take good photos again, I can't even tell you.

Our first road trip!

GBP (gratuitous baby post) warning!


Last Friday, the Shop Monkey informed me that we were going to Cannon Beach the next day.  I was fairly nervous about the 1.5hr drive, but the Squids were amazing.  They napped their morning nap on the way there, and their afternoon nap on the way back.  Perfect!

(Obviously, I just pinched him. j/k!)

I do!

I absolutely love it when people share their wedding photos with me.

Jewelry takes to the sea

Man, I want to be there too!  I love sailing. (Though, that might be a bit creepy, crashing someone's marriage proposal, haha.)

It's the little things

I have been wanting shelves in my studio for almost a year now.  It's crazy how fast last year went by.  Buying a house, moving, building a studio, and having two babies makes time fly.  But I now have a couple of shelves and my books aren't taking up counter space anymore, which is fabulous.  It's so funny how little things can make such a big difference.  I recently rearranged my living room and bedroom and the difference is so huge!  It's like a new space entirely (I feel that way at least).  

So I finally made a copy of my wedding ring.  I was really ambivalent about adding the design to my shop for a long time (years....), but I finally took the plunge and I'm happy about.  It's so gorgeous (IMHO) and decadent (so much gold!) that I think it deserves to be shared, rather than hoarded for myself.  And besides that, most of my sentimentalness (new word) has had time to wear off a bit.  I still love my ring, but it doesn't bother me to know that there will be other women wearing the same thing.  I just hope they love it as much as I do. :-)

(I'm hard to photograph!)

And did you happen to be cruising for adorable baby pictures?  Let me help you out:

hahahahahahahahaha

I just thought I would share this.  I think it is really spot on for those jewelry/diamond commercials with the over the top descriptions.

This, that, and the other

Finally!  Summer is here.  Thank goodness.  It was a pretty mild winter, though.  Not that I was aware of much of it.  Having two babies will do that to a person.  I'm back in the studio 20 hours a week now and I'm so glad to have some time to work on new things.  This new design (shown here in extremely flattering aqua blue injection wax) is something I'm super excited about.  It will have a single stone gypsy set, flush with the curve of the top of the ring.  I think it will be a great choice for people who are worried about "wearability".  I like it especially since it is a bit different from your regular solitaire.  A little more old fashioned?

And now to non-jewelry related content!  Feel free to tune out now.

Mandrake roots!  Quick, cover your ears.  No, kidding. It's just our demented carrots.  The garden is really coming along. Now that the summer weather is here in earnest (knock on wood), our tomatoes and other things should be taking off soon.  We've planted pickling cucumbers, radishes, strawberries, kale, lettuces, peas, zucchinis, carrots, onions, lemon cucumbers, pumpkins, and peppers.  I think that's it.  This year is our experimental year, we hope that next year we will have a better idea of how to manage our massive veggie garden.  Honestly, it might be a bit much for us.

I have a sitter!  Where did my tiny baby go!??!  Sad sad sad face!  This is Addy, and he is an award winning sitter.  He went from a couple of wobbly seconds upright to BAM! Champion sitting, in just a couple of days.

And this baby wants to steal my coffee, water, beer....pretty much any liquid that is going into my mouth.  This morning as I was eating my cheerios, she was watching every bite like a hawk, and when I would catch her staring she would give me a grin.  She is SO ADORABLE!

All right, I'm going to sit in the sun for a few minutes before I head back to the studio!  I'm working on one of these:

New!?

So, I've had the chance these last couple of weeks to carve a few new things and this is what I've come up with:

I wanted to add a new five stone ring to my collection, and this one has a carved band (you can't see it, it's sort of driftwoody).  The stones will be bigger than any of the other eternity rings, 2.5mm rather than 2mm, so I'm expecting it to be extremely sparkly!

The solitaire has a wide rounded band that tapers toward the palm side.  It's sort of curved around the top of the band.  I didn't plan on pairing these two when I carved them, but I think they would look great together.  Zing zing va-zing!

This is the one I'm a bit hesitant about, it's different from most of the stuff that I make.  But I wanted to branch out a bit.  I would also like to make something with a halo setting (diamonds all around the central stone), so I'm going to try to carve something along those lines.  I don't want it to be like the typical halo setting so I'll have to think on it a bit before I start anything.

And my little tinies!  I love them!  I reeeeaaaaallllly love them!

Thinking inside the box...

....or the cushion cut as the case may be.

Last Wednesday night, the tenth of April, two thousand and thirteen, I slept 8 hours of glorious, sweet, and uninterrupted sleep.  This momentous event has yet to be repeated (although Addy did sleep a solid ten hours straight last night!  Alas, his sister did not. Woe is me.), but I continue to hold out hope that it will become a regular occurrence in the near future.

Not only did the sleep restore me to partial sanity, it also gave me the juice I needed to get this project done.  I have been wanting to expand the shape of stones I work with (I get A LOT of requests for cushion cut stones), but something held me back.  I think I was intimidated a bit by the corners.  Round stones are old hat to me by now, but I haven't set a square(ish) stone since I was in school.  I've had this model, unset, kicking around for at least a year.  It's just sterling and cubic zirconium, but I'm pretty excited to make it again in precious materials.  I think the first version will be moissanite in palladium, but I would love to do a more delicate iteration in platinum and diamond.

It wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be, so I feel pretty confident now.  I think I will take another stone setting class this summer though. I would love to do a princess cut bezel set ring in the near future, but I need to brush up on setting truly square stones.  On an unrelated topic, I have a couple of new designs carved already for this year, with the molds made and everything!  I'm super excited about them, but I will save them for another post.  One is a real departure from my regular style, and I feel a little nervous about it.  I'm debating on whether or not I should wait until I have them done done, or if I should share photos of the waxes first.

And on the home front, I have adorable babies.

They are getting SO BIG.  It's crazy.  They will be 4 months in a couple of days.  They both like to practice sitting, so I'm hoping I will have some upright babies soon!  We bought a couple of old fashioned wooden highchairs and I plan on painting them bright colors.  We won't start solids for a while, but I am so excited to give them their first solid food!  I've heard sweet potato is the way to go?

Man, I sound tired

So here is short video of my new studio space.  I sound extremely tired and bit incoherent.  Sorry about that.  I am not one of those people who can function at 100% after a bad night of sleep (or 3+ months of bad sleep, as the case may be).  I think the thing I notice the most is that I seem to struggle for words.  Sometimes I will just stop talking about 2/3 of the way through a sentence and my husband will be like "what"?  And I then I won't remember what I was saying.  This doesn't happen in the video, but I do call the ultrasonic cleaner an ultrasound, and the sleeves on my apron, arms.  Haha. Maybe I need to increase my coffee intake.

The lack of sleep is KILLING me, but they sure are cute.

I've been working like a little gnome out in the studio on those new waxes.  I'm just not sure what metal to make the first versions in.  People seem to prefer white metals, but yellow gold is always calling my name.  We'll just have to see.

Have I Ever Mentioned

That I'm obsessed with Iceland?  I've wanted to go for at least 10 years.  It was a possibility for our honeymoon, but since we got married in the dead of winter, it just wasn't going to happen.  :-(  Maybe sometime soon the Shop Monkey and I can pack up the Squids and head on over for a soak in the blue pool and some gandering at the beautiful foss(es?) of the place.

But until I can find the time (who knows), I guess I will have to be satisfied that one of my rings has already made the trip.  (Thanks for the photos Krystal!)

And in case you were wondering why I would want to to travel to a place with a name as forbidding as Ice-Land!

 (ahhhhhhh.......)

 (Of course, not sure if I would be able to get up this early.)

(How can you not want to live here?  Maybe I'm a weirdo, but this looks just about 

perfect to me.  And not even much gloomier than Oregon!)

(Have your rings traveled to places exotic?  Do you have photos!?  I would love it if you would share them with me!  If no photos, maybe leave a comment about your travels!  My rings spent a week in Paris and two weeks in Israel.  They've floated in the Dead Sea and traversed the Catacombs!  They climbed Masada and the Arc de Triomphe!  They even spent a day in Jordan!)