One thing leads to another

Last week I made a piece with beach glass, which I showcased in another post. Usually I fire the beach glass with the metal clay, but this time I tried another method of connecting them with wire. (Originally I had planned on making metal clay components to hold them to the backing, but that didn't work..... I miscalculated the space necessary to fit the metal clay pieces around the glass.)

This particular piece looked like it needed some companionship so I designed two more necklaces to be worn with it or by themselves. The patina on the original piece ranged from copper to blue so I focused on making the other necklaces with copper beads, clear beads to pick up the clear glass and green adventurine to echo the green glass.

Major waves, little beach glass

My college roommate, Cindi Armstrong, comes to visit me every year over Labor Day. When I was teaching, our time together was limited. But, now that I'm retired we have lots of time to visit and enjoy our usual adventures (with a few new ones each year. Like visiting the new winery and discovering a sweet little wine called "Dazzle").

We always make visits to our camper on Lake Erie. One of our favorite pastimes is to walk the beach looking for beach glass. One would think that really strong waves would bring in more glass, but sometimes it doesn't seem to work that way. Maybe what the waves bring in, they take back out.

This year the weather was pretty violent. There were some pretty heavy duty storms with lightning and very, very strong winds. The waves were white capping and the flags were flying straight out.

Cindi and I braved the weather and headed to the beach for a short (and I mean short) walk (we didn't want to get blown away). We found several larger pieces and a variety of colors. The first thing I found was a brown piece of ironware with an interesting design on it. After that there was nothing of exception.

Another thing we usually do is make a piece of jewelry. Two years ago I taught her how to do Kumihimo and last year she worked with the metal clay for the first time. She made a piece that was similar to one of my pieces. This year, we again did metal clay and combined it with beach glass.

This time, Cindi tried her hand at designing and created her own original piece. We added the beach glass after firing with wire or thread. Cindi's piece has the blue glass. I think she did a great job!