Personal Projects, 4/26/26

This month's passion projects involve that upcoming jewelry launch I've mentioned before, a personal collage (this will be a separate post), a finished painting, and my renewed love for photography combined with my love of exploring.

I made myself a trial bracelet and necklace for the jewelry line. For the bracelet, instead of using the silver lined seed beads I'll use for the line's bracelets, I used some 3mm gemstone beads I've been wanting to work with for a few years but couldn't find the right project. It's not a common gemstone at all, and you can hardly find information online. It's called Phosphosiderite and it is a lovely orchid/lilac color. I'm thrilled with how it turned out and have been wearing it every day, but the toggle clasp - my favorite clasp to use - has unfortunately failed to stay clasped, so when I create the line, I will begrudgingly use a lobster clasp.

The necklace I made exactly as I intend to sell it, the fun psychedelic eye in blue. I

love it! However, the beads I was intending to buy in bulk to make all of the necklaces ... I don't like the lack of uniformity in how they line up, so I may look for others.

I'm starting to think about the great big abstract and am thinking about a jeweled, swirling agate look like this or a more '60s look like this. Either way, I'm looking at jewel tones with metallic gold highlights.

I finished "Peter Maximalist" and it's hanging on the wall. As it's a rough copy of Peter Max's Sunrise 2000, this one's for me alone - I would never sell something I copied. I did it as a learning exercise, and I did learn quite a bit about color mixing, among other things. This was a thoroughly enjoyable painting to work on.

I also finished my colleague's retirement gift of a necklace. She wears autumn colors that work with her auburn hair and likes Unakite, so I pulled out some Unakite and orange dyed quartz beads I have to make it. With some bronze findings and charms, including a small carnelian, it turned out to look like something she might have bought for herself - I hope!

And instead of doing what I used to do in the aughts when I first took up photography - take an afternoon drive to a different town, drive through as much of it as possible in a few hours, take pictures of the standout interesting/historic stuff and go home and call it done, I'm thinking now of picking a town and going back every weekend for a month until I've truly experienced it. Really combining my love of exploring with the photos. I'm looking forward to planning this out!

Why Not: As much of the U.S. is heading into rainy season, buy yourself a new umbrella - but make it artistic! Or paint a galaxy on your current one? (Though I'd add a sealant of some kind over it.)