I must be stuck on jewelry making this week, because I keep coming across ideas that reel me in. I’m so taken with the artistry that is put into craft these days that I often wonder why we even bother to make a distinction between craft and art. Well, sure, I can tell the difference between a crocheted toilet paper cover and the Mona Lisa, but I also see a lot of jewelry and artwear that easily belongs in a frame.
I like gems and precious metals as well as the next rapacious female, but I tend to like big and bold. (As an aside, can someone tell me why huge ladies seem to love teensy gold chains just long enough to let the charm dangle on top of their amazing shelves? Like mom used to say, a peanut on a watermelon.) Anyway, I’m not little and I like jewelry that can be seen across the room. It’s supposed to attract attention, right? So far no one has offered to give me rocks the size of Liz Taylor’s, and I wouldn’t have any place to wear them anyway, so I go for “unusual”.
I’ve just mentioned steampunk, and am really looking forward to Jean Campbell’s upcoming book on it, but in the meantime, I’ve been really intrigued by books showing how to make jewelry from hardware. There are plenty of instructions out there on using hardware, paper, or various recycled materials. Nicole Sherman's got a great one on mixing industrial with beads and precious metals, and there's another one (link below) that is more "purist" in just using hardware--and it comes with a spiral binding so you can actually follow the instructions rather than wrestling the book. After spending a lot of time being awestruck by these folks’ creativity (still am), it finally hit me that the key to selecting and using such materials is shape, not actual object. If you take traditional bead shapes (cylinders, spheres, cubes, tubes) and check out what objects from (anywhere) might be the approximate similar shape, you’re off to the races. And isn’t abstraction of form what all artists do?
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