No, I did not make this. I wasn’t clever enough to dream it up. It’s a bracelet made with potato chip bags. Check it out at Craft Bits. Talk about mixed media jewelry!

…Or, actually, today the jewelry for my new book, Making Designer Mixed-Media and Memory Jewelry: Fun and Experimental Techniques and Materials for the Home Studio, will be out the door and off to Fedex and onto all the great mixed media artists who helped with this book. I’ve got 25 packages going out today. I’m sure I will totally impress the Fedex office when I carry all of those in there.
One of the things you don’t always think about when it comes to writing jewelry making books is all the clerical type work involved. I had to number and label …read more

Wow! This has been a great week for me. I’m seeing my jewelry all over the place lately. First, Beadwork, and now I just got my latest baby in the mail yesterday from the publisher. This is my review copy, so I’m supposed to look through it and find any errors so they can fix them asap. Of course, it’s hard to do that while you are drooling over it.
I’d love to take credit for every piece of jewelry in there, but alas, I had some wonderfully talented artists help out with this book. The cover piece, among many others …read more

One of the things I told myself when I finally graduated is that I will be free to start participating in arts and crafts and bead shows. Not that I did a whole lot of that before I returned to school, but there are so many conventions these days that I feel I should really considering going to a few.
About five or six years ago, I went to the BeadExpo when it was in Miami, and it was a great experience. The class I took was only so-so, but just being around so many bead lovers and hanging out with …read more

I love making tree ornaments. Every year when we put up our tree and decorate it, I enjoy seeing all the ornaments I’ve made over the years. I also make ornaments as gifts, giving them out to editors, teachers, people who have helped me in my writing and jewelry career. Last year, I made the pictured shell and bead oranments.
I was thinking of making more shell ornaments this year, just using different shells, and I had planned to head out to the local shell shop (the other shells I found on the beach) and pick up some fancier shells. Unfortunately, …read more

Finally, it’s a – live!
I mentioned just recently that I had an annoucement to make about my fellow blogging buddy Cyndi Lavin, and now that everything is in place I can finally give the details: Cyndi is now part of the b5media.com family with her mixed media weblog called Layers Upon Layers.
You’ll see the ocassional jewelry post there too because she makes mixed media style jewelry, but you’ll also see all kinds of other great art work.
Welcome Cyndi!

Making Designer Mixed-Media and Memory Jewelry: Fun and Experimental Techniques and Materials for the Home Studio is now available on Amazon.com (just click on the title above to zip over there) for early ordering.
Now it says on Amazon that this book comes out in March 2007, but I was told May 2007. So I’m not really sure what the deal is with that. I guess I need to ask my editor. Maybe because of all the hoo-haw going on with mixed media type jewelry these days they decided to publish it sooner. Hopefully, that’s the case.
You’ll notice too if you go over …read more

Some of the cool jewelry you’ll find in my next book, Making Designer Mixed-Media and Memory Jewelry: Fun and Experimental Techniques and Materials for the Home Studio, is the use of old jewelry as components for creating new jewelry. This is a wonderful form of recycling, and it can be fun to take an old brooch your grandmother might have worn and turn it into a pendant for a necklace (just as an example).
I recently happened to come across an on-line article about this, and while unfortunately, they give no pictures of the finished product, the author does give some …read more

So many jewelry making techniques, so little space and time!
I’ve add two new categories to this blog: Fiber Jewelry and Mixed Media Jewelry.
Enjoy!

I have a new felt and chain necklace project posted on my About.com site. The felt is actually rope felt that I got from Ornamentea.com – Very unusual stuff. The large linked chain used in this project also came from their web site.
It’s pretty hot outside, so it’s kind of hard to imgine wearing felt right now, but come winter time (especially up north) I think we’ll be seeing a good deal of felt jewelry this season.