<![CDATA[D2B Jewelry - Confessions of a Jewelry Junkie]]>Thu, 16 Apr 2020 12:40:41 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Ay Di Me!!!]]>Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:05:05 GMThttp://www.d2bjewelry.com/confessions-of-a-jewelry-junkie/ay-di-mePicture
It may be possible that I could, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, be a little tiny bit obsessed with jewelry. DUH!

I've been playing around with a new form of Cold Processed Porcelain. It's lighter and stronger than the PMJ I was using and I get a lot better finish with a lot less work. and it's a LOT easier to make!

The stuff I've been making has evolved to very 3-D forms, some of them hollow, like the piece at the left. I can put different bath salts or even the tip of a Q-tip dipped in my favorite perfumes or essential oils in them so, once again, I can smell pretty without wearing perfume.

I'm really loving the way this stuff works up - the only drawback is the amount of time it takes to dry, which is significantly longer than the PMJ. On the plus side, I can directly tint the clay itself so I don't use nearly as much paint on the surface and I can make some really nice effects like tie-died, water colored, and marbled surfaces. Check them out!

To paraphrase a quote from one of my favorite Gerry Butler movies, "Madness? THIS IS CREATIVITY!" LOL!
]]><![CDATA[It ain't silver but it's just too cool for words!]]>Sun, 12 Feb 2012 16:15:03 GMThttp://www.d2bjewelry.com/confessions-of-a-jewelry-junkie/it-aint-silver-but-its-just-too-cool-for-words
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I've been in a bind since the precious metals market went so crazy. I LOVE making silver jewelry but I really can't afford to do it anymore, especially with the economy so crappy. Strangely enough, some people consider jewelry to be a luxury, not a necessity. Hmm, imagine that! Economy informs art, or at least it does in my case.

I had to do something to get these designs out of my head. I was flipping through a book that someone had given me about making small sculptures and figurines out of papier mache clay when I had an epiphany. Why couldn't I make stuff out of the clay, let it harden and paint the heck out of it? I could indulge in several fancies at once. I love black and white drawings, watercolors, acrylics, almost every color imaginable, and jewelry. The idea was born.

I started by trying to use the recipe for papier mache clay that was in the book. Meh. The results were less than satisfactory. I made a couple of modifications to the recipe and tried again. Better, but still not quite as good as I wanted it to be. Back to the laboratory (aka my kitchen) and more mods. After several tries and careful annotations of the original recipe, I finally got it right. It would hold the shape I formed it to, it sanded well, I could slick on a finish coat to cover any cracks or low spots, then give it one more sanding and voila!

I use Micron .005 tip pens to draw with, several different kinds of paint, Mod Podge to coat it with, and a lot of time and patience. Most of the pieces take anywhere from a week to a month to finish. I have to make absolutely certain they're completely dry before I can work them. The actual arty part usually takes me a couple of days, counting drying time. 

I've made necklaces, bracelets and earrings. Rings don't seem to work well because of the thickness required to make the pieces sturdy, but everything else is just so much fun and so satisfying!

If you're interested you can click on the home button and check out PMJ - that's short for Papier Mache Jewelry. Let me know what you think!
]]><![CDATA[I won the silver medal in FireMountain Gems Jewelry Design Contest!!!!]]>Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:11:28 GMThttp://www.d2bjewelry.com/confessions-of-a-jewelry-junkie/i-won-the-silver-medal-in-firemountain-gems-jewelry-design-contestLast month was horrid! Our car broke down 3 times, then finally gave up  the ghost. The power wen out in half out house - the half that had the AC unit hooked to it - and the temps were record setting hot, like 114 degrees hot. Our water heater blew out and flooded the utility room. My hubby's hours were cut at work.My dryer quit working. All in all, a really crappy month, right?

Not so, dear reader, totally not so!

I had forgotten that I entered the FireMountain Gems Jewelry Design Contest in the Art Clay Silver category. About the middle of the month, I was looking for the necklace that I'd sent in and suddenly remembered, hey, I sent it to these guys and I haven't heard back from them, so I gave them a little call.

I swear, you could hear my squeal all the way across own! Dogs cowered, my cats streaked away, and pigeons from 4 blocks away took flight in sheer panic! When they told me I'd won the silver medal, I totally came unglued. My hubby had to come peel me off the ceiling, then get me to quit babbling long enough to figure out what I was saying.

When he did finally understand, he smiled a huge smile and said, and I quote, :Finally, someone else knows what I've been saying for years. You really are that talented." Yep ladies, he's a keeper and he's all mine. Talk about validation!

There were over 5,000 submissions to this contest. Can you say flabbergasted? I won the silver medal for a necklace that I'd made over 4 years ago, when I was barely getting started! Woohooooo! I'm still all a twitter about it!

They sent me a copy of the ad they'll use and it's freakin' gorgeous! It's amazing what a pro photographer can do to make things look so fantastic, and the team at FMG is just awesome. I have a call in to them to see if I can show the add on my website a
 ]]><![CDATA[Necessity is a mother, but burnt fingers can stimulate your creativity]]>Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:45:18 GMThttp://www.d2bjewelry.com/confessions-of-a-jewelry-junkie/necessity-is-a-mother-but-burnt-fingers-can-stimulate-your-creativityPicture
Yesterday I made 14 of these little...
well, I'll call them darlings because this post is rated PG. They came really close to driving me nuts until I finally figured out that I could use the handle of a foam brush to hold them while I polished them. I use a Dremel and a lot of pressure and rotation, so the metal heats up really fast and hot enough to blister my fingertips. I also use several different compounds, not the least of which is jewelers rouge, which makes the little buggers really slippery. After the 5th one went flying across the room like a jet propelled jumping bean on speed, I had had enough and was ready to quit. Even my cats were getting tired of chasing them, and they adore shiny skittery things.

I was about to throw the Dremel down on the table and stalk off in a state of medium dudgeon (not quite as extreme as high dudgeon, but headed in that direction) when I saw the handle of the foam brush and had that proverbial light bulb flash over my head. I spent the next 43 minutes trying to find my errant necklace, finally discovering it wedged into the pages of a tech manual on the computer desk across the room, then had to find the right size of handle to fit the internal diameter of the tube without a) splitting it down one side, or b) being so loose it didn't hold firmly enough.

A few minutes of trial and error, and finally hitting on the idea of padding the handle with strips from my hubby's roll of shop towels, I had a working solution! In addition, my polishing time jumped up exponentially faster, mostly because I wasn't having to chase the slippery little buggers down every two minutes. It had taken me almost 45 minutes to polish one of them, and took me an hour and a half to polish the other 13. Woohoo!

So, in my little world, things are looking up because necessity is the mother of really strange inventions, like shop towels on a brush handle to stabilize and hold a tube of silver so I don't fry my fingers or break another window, or scare my cats, yet again.
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