Joy! Joy! Joy! Spring has arrived. I put away my drab wool coat and thick socks and — finally — broke out a cute pair of sandals! I have a bit of pep in my step now that I don’t have to worry about slipping on ice.
Spring is a time of renewal for me; my curious/creative muse leads me to try new things.
Last month, I attended the Art Glass and Bead Show in Madison, Wis., for the first time and I must say it’s a great show. I caught up with several longtime friends and had a great time shopping. The vendors were top tier and showed a lot of variety. I bought an assortment of beads and my daughter even won a door prize! For this blog, I'm showing you the fantastic African beads that I bought at the show. I love the ethnic, handmade feel that these beads have and they just might be the inspiration needed for some new ideas I've been working on.
I also saw Jeff Barber at the Madison show and fell for his new electroformed art glass beads. These beauties have been popular at bead shows ever since Tucson. Jeff is also making gorgeous glass cone beads, which beaders will go bananas over. (Watch for upcoming Bead&Button magazine coverage.)
Back to the topic at hand — PLAY!
During the week, I received a box containing GlasClay, a new product on the market. GlasClay is a lot like precious metal clay. It contains finely ground glass particles mixed with a binder that can be shaped like clay and then fired in a kiln.
Thrilled at the prospect of exploring a new product, I called my friend, Brenda Schweder, to see if she had heard about GlasClay. Brenda is a highly creative jewelry artist, author, and teacher and has a fabulous wardrobe. Like me, she’s a redhead, so we’re simpatico. She wrote the jewelry how-to book Vintage Redux and is teaching five classes at the Bead&Button Show that you don’t want to miss.
Brenda is intrigued by the whole GlasClay concept, so we’ve made a date for a GlasClay “play day” together. In anticipation, I’ve created a detailed list of the things that I want to accomplish on our special day, approaching this task with the seriousness of a tax accountant. There is much work to do. Designs need to be sketched. Ramping and firing schedules must be developed, tools acquired, and so on.
Later on, while scrawling PLAY WITH GLASCLAY on my calendar, I wondered if I would be able to free my mind to actually play?
Do you find it easy to playfully create? Do we sometimes lose our ability to let go and play? I worry about approaching our date with an overly determined mind but also about making a piece for my “private” (i.e. truly embarrassing first attempts) collection.
Beth Stone, author of Seed Bead Stitching and the new More Seed Bead Stitching, knows how to play with jewelry designs and beads. I just spoke with Beth recently, and she mentioned sitting down and playing with seed beads as a way of inventing new variations of old stitches. More Seed Bead Stitching is a sensory overload of bead colors combined with excellent instructions for making jewelry, so Beth’s methods work for her.
For some of us, however, letting go and playing with a handicraft that we take very seriously can be difficult.
I think some beaders train themselves to meticulously follow detailed instructions and cull imperfect seed beads in order to achieve a sense of perfection. I am guilty of taking apart many rows of work because I stitched one bead in the wrong place. Perhaps I need to put aside my lists and play!
Okay, so now that I’ve committed myself to more play “in public,” so to speak, I promise to blog about my experience with GlasClay and give you the lowdown on this new, exciting product. I’ll share the high and lows, pics included, in the next installment of Maggie’s Musings.
‘Til then, let’s all go play with our beads!
Maggie Roschyk is an accomplished beadwork and jewelry artist who teaches jewelry making and publishes articles about designing jewelry. She loves teaching aspiring artists and seeing the "aha" moment in their eyes. Her goal is to inspire others to look beyond the empirical moment and strive to create beaded art that reflects their individualism.