New Issue of Handcrafted Jewelry Magazine with Resin information

A while ago, Interweave Press asked me to update a past article I wrote on Resin, for a project issue to be published on mixed media jewelry. I said "Sure - you bet!!!" and the issue is now available!!! Click on the picture for the link to order!

It is available for $7.99

Was just wondering if this would work..........

Recently I wrote an article on different kinds of resins for for Jewelry Artist Magazine. There turned out to be one major standout from the crowd (called Magic-Glos by Lisa Pavelka) and since it is non-toxic and cures/dries in about seven minutes by exposing it to sunlight - it is a "UV Resin", I have been fiddling around with it a lot! I was just taking a break from paperwork and sitting on my patio. I occured to me that if I did not seal a piece of paper before applying the resin, perhaps I could wet the paper after the resin had cured and rub the paper off leaving the ink image. I grabbed the Vogue magazine I had been reading, and a vintage comic and a playing card and set to work.

I applied the resin in a thin coat on the paper samples by sqeezing the bottle and kind of "scribbling" the resin onto the paper (it cures faster if it is a thin coat and it is easier to cut).

I left the samples in the sun for about 10 minutes. I took a circle punch (scrapbooking section of hobby store) (invaluable for cutting images to be used in bezels!) and punched out the images and placed them under running water. While I had them under the faucet I gently rubbed the back side (paper side) of the disk to get rid of the paper.

What I found out: Playing card did not work. Comic did not work (the ink did not stick to the resin, it came off with the paper). Ad from magazine worked beautifully!!! See pictures!

Try it!

Vintage Craft Suppliers

Two new places for you to visit on the web today. One I have been buying from for years and one is new to me!

D. Blumchen & Co.
I found out about this company through a reference from the online Martha Stewart site and fell in love with their products. They have so many vintage paper goods, millinery flowers, etc it is absolutely amazing! Do you remember those little crepe paper nut cups from tea parties when you were little? They are still being made and are available! My daughter and I had a Springtime Mother/Daughter Tea and used them for favors. One of the most significant things they have is Lametta Tinsel.......Lametta Tinsel is magical. It is thin wired tinsel that is silver plated so it tarnishes....beautifully and is soooo hard to find! It is wonderful as trim on anything and everything and is so subtle and gorgeous! Do you remember seeing those beautiful spun glass starburst ornaments with little angels or santas in the middle (probably at your grandmother's house)?.....they sell everything you need to make one and if you go to Martha Stewarts website, there is a video showing you how!!!
Click on words in blue for a link to the subject.






Papier Valise - Provisions for the Creative Journey - new to me and absolutely fabulous!! They have amazing vintage things for scrapbooking, crafts, art collages......think Joseph Campbell......labels, charms, candy cane twine for packages wrapped in brown paper......you will love it - if only to peruse! .......by the way, tell me if I'm wrong but I think vintage library book cards are a fab gift tag for bottles of wine, etc!

Whimsies

I was talking about these jars today at lunch and thought I would share them with you! I recently bought one of these in San Francisco and ended up giving it to our 6 year old daughter as a birthday gift. It is probably her most favorite thing ever given to her. She plays with the contents ENDLESSLY! She plays, she makes, she covets......all from the contents of this plastic jar -- an absolute bargain at $35. Go to ONE GOOD BUMBLEBEE and order one....now, before they stop selling them!....always a fear. These jars are very hard to give away....I gave it to her because I knew it would be kept "in the family"....you might want to order one for yourself. When my daughter saw this, she said "is it really all for me Mama? You won't use any of it for your jewelry?"

Cabinets of Wonder & Joseph Cornell

I have always been fascinated with Cabinets of curiosities (also known as Wunderkammer, Cabinets of Wonder, or wonder-rooms). I have always wanted to take a stab at making one for myself and have been collecting odds and ends for years with that goal in mind. I made a piece for a gallery show I was in last summer at Mariposa Gallery that was kind of along the lines of something like a Wunderkammer but grew into more of a box of secrets. I designed a scene for the top and when it was done, I looked at it and thought "it reminds me of the phrase "a little bird told me".....which then of course led me to secrets.....which then led me to a book I had purchased and later regretted..... Post Secret. It is a collection of postcards with secrets people want to get off their chest, sent annonomously to a man who publishes them in books and online. It is a kind of performance art project and quite amazing, but the books are so so so depressing! I did not know this when I bought the book and used the "A Little Bird Told Me" piece to get the book out of my house! I cut it up and pasted the pages on cards and filed them under catagories in this box. Finally I was free! Wahoo!......but I was still really intrigued by the box (I loved the box and the process of making the box) and started doing more research on this kind of composition. I stumbled upon a kids kit/craft/art history book on a man named Joseph Cornell and absolutely fell in love. He is very famous and his work is in many museums. We was an odd duck, which just makes his work all the more fascinating to me. With that in mind, I thought I would post some info on him and some sources you might like to visit to purchase things to make your own boxes! I found some amazing sites with materials like antique and vintage ledger pages, ephemera, vintage ribbon, buttons, etc. I'll add more later, but at the bottom are some to get you started! So many times this kind of stuff is overpriced but some sites are really great about keeping the prices affordable. Bocage has tulle fringe!!! Who has tulle fringe!! Holy cow!If you know of any other sites for this kind of stuff, please let me know!!!


"[Cornell] spent most of his life in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York, with his mother and his crippled brother, Robert. From there this reclusive, gray, long-beaked man would sally forth on small voyages of discovery, scavenging for relics of the past in New York junk shops and flea markets. To others, these deposits might be refuse, but to Cornell they were the strata of repressed memory, a jumble of elements waiting to be grafted and mated to one another.
"In the studio he would sort his finds into their eccentric categories - 'Spiders,' 'Moons,' and so forth - and file them with boxes of his own mementos, like love letters to Jennifer Jones and other movie stars or ballet dancers he'd never met; and from them he made boxes. He would tinker with them for years. Object (Roses des Vents) was begun in 1942 and not finished until 1953. It is full of emblems of voyages Cornell never took, a little box of mummified waves and shrunken exotic coasts, peninsulas, planets, things set in compartments, with a drop-in panel containing twenty-one compasses, each with its needle pointing insouciantly in a different direction from that of its neighbor. Even the map on the inside of the lid, cut from some nineteenth-century German chart book, depicts an excessively remote coastline: that of the Great Australian Bight. The earth is presented not as our daily habitat but as one strange planet among others, which to Cornell it was.
Sometimes he would crack the glass pane that protected the contents of the box, but that is all he allowed in the way of violence - it suggests that the sanctuary of imagination has been attacked. That glass, the 'fourth wall' of his miniature theater, is also the diaphragm between two contrasting worlds. Outside, chaos, accident, and libido, the stuff of unprotected life; inside, sublimation, memory, and peace, one of whose chief emblems was the caged bird, the innocent resident of The Hotel Eden, 1945.

- From "American Visions", by Robert Hughes

Sources for great vintage and antique ephemera, etc.

Collage Closet
Ornamentea
Bocage New York

My first post and it is a quick one!

I've got 20 minutes before I have to pick up our little one from school but wanted to at least post something to one of my new blogs! The subject is the magazine Craft: - please tell me you've seen it....and if not, go to their website RIGHT NOW! It is fantastic - and don't miss their blog!