Propaganda

My regularly scheduled bullshit it still techicly on hole till all of thr new stuff starts coming in but I did get some new needles (since I was down to my last and its sort of curved at this point) and some new 8lb line.

Last time I bought line, I bought it from an outdoors store in Oregon. But this time I bought it from Amazon.

And I discovered a strange thing.

Both are 125yd but the one from amazon that has "beadsmith" on it is much larger.

This feels like a waste of plastic...and I'm now worried that I may have paid more for a logo and extra plastic. May have to find a new local fishing store...

This pendant is a perfect example of my love for Tumblr as an artistic business.

I love Tumblr for the fandom, the jokes, to social commentary, and the things that are just too difficult to explain to people not on this hellsite (affectionate).

But, this. This pendant. Damn.

We made these adorable little Robin Pendants with hand enameled masks and little crystals probably close to a decade ago. (Checking the OP timestamp it was December 2014).

When I originally sat down to make them I wasn't just going to enamel one of each color to see who was popular, that would have been silly. So I made a bunch of each.

In business terms, they flopped. But I always loved them.

They haven't been on our website since probably 2016 or 2018 (two big overhauls happened those years). The pendants were all disassembled so the crystal could be used elsewhere. And the Robins have been in a drawer ever since.

So why is this little pendant above so special to me and my feelings about Tumblr?

Because I took that photo today. Of a Stephanie Brown Robin Pendant I made this afternoon. Because someone found that ancient post, and commented on it that they'd love one of these. I was able to reach out and let them know it was possible. And through the magic of Tumblr we resurrected an 8 year old retired jewelry piece.

That's not something that happens on other social media sites. Once something is gone from the front page, it's gone forever. Resigned to the dustbin of digital history.

But here, here we celebrate "World Heritage Posts". We queue things like Sascha the Christmas Tiger 365 days in advance. We delight in going digging to find bits of the things we love.

And as an artist who tries desperately to make a living off of the shiny things we make, the fact that something can be found a week later, a year later, a decade later. It really is magic.

So yeah. Just going to be over here being sappy about community and jewelry for awhile.

I knew what this recipe was going in. You don’t see a recipe bragging about how few ingredients it uses and think “surely this will be delicious.” You think “It’s 1 AM and this looks like a vehicle to carry sugar into my body.” So none of what I’m about to say is on Ms. Davison, or her recipe.

There is a place in Terry Pratchet’s Discworld called the Great Nef desert. This is a desert so dry that even water isn’t wet in the Great Nef. Within this desert is the Dehydrated Ocean, a body of water in an uncommon fourth state of matter. This dry water forms silvery grains and resembles a powder more than a liquid.

There is a kind of wizard in Discworld called a hydrophobe. These wizards are raised from birth without ever coming into contact with liquid water. They are sustained only by the dry water from the Dehydrated Ocean. The result is a fear and hatred of water so ingrained that it allows these individuals to literally repel water, which is then used to power hover craft for crossing lakes and oceans.

When I first read this description in The Color of Magic, years ago, I wondered what kind of food the hydrophobes ate. When a hydrophobe sits down to their breakfast of corn flakes and a mummified orange, with what do they butter their stale, overdone toast?

Finally, in the pile of yellow dust I pulled from my oven after 7 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius, I have my answer.

After two rounds of ordering many many tiny 8g viles of number 11 wisteria lined crystal toho sead beads, I gave up and looked for bulk.

So for about $77 or about 15.5 cents a gram,

I am now the proud owner if half a kilo of these beeds

Behold! The riches of the third house!

And please ignore the state of my rug

This morning, I want to work on my project, but I also do not want to leave my nice warm bed and more importantly, I do not want to spill seed beads in my sheets again

One of the crazy things about getting good at a craft, in my case beading, is the ability to look at something and understand how it was constructed.

I can look at a necklace and start breaking down the stitches.

And my mind will reconstruct the technique.

I imagine that this phenomenon happens to painters, sculptures, embroideries, writers, comics builders, taylors and smiths..

Buts it's kind of amazing to understand how art gets made

Teri Greeves, a Kiowa artist, celebrates her husband’s Anishinaabe culture in this artwork through beaded designs inspired by aesthetics and dance traditions indigenous to the Great Lakes region. Floral motifs and contemporary jingle-dress dancers in complementary colors adorn a pair of high-heeled sneakers, a riff on the traditional knee-high moccasins worn by Kiowa women. Along with glass and bugle beads, the designs are made with chonchos and cabochon shells, which add a three-dimensional element to the work, and Swarovski crystals. Greeves says, “I found a way to use the materials and techniques of the old masters and mix them up with new materials and techniques for my generation, all in an attempt to interpret this twenty-first century world I live in.” 

This work recently came back on view, you can find it in the American Art galleries. 

Posted by Elizabeth Treptow Teri Greeves (Kiowa, born 1970). Great Lakes Girls, 2008. Glass beads, bugle beads, Swarovski crystals, sterling silver stamped conchae, spiny oyster shell cabochons, canvas high-heeled sneakers. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Stanley J. Love, by exchange, 2009.1a-b. Creative Commons-BY