My Monday Challenge

Today, while making jewelry, I challenged myself to a little game, and the result was a pretty awesome longgggg necklace.   While going through my jewelry I decided to use some beads that I have had forever and have never found a use for.  I had a whole little bead box of them, in all different little shapes and bright colors.  The challenge lay in not only using beads I had never seemed to find a use for before, but I also made it interesting by cutting an extremely lengthy piece of clear plastic thread and telling myself I either had to bead until the string was full or until I ran out of beads, whichever came first.  I didn't think it would take as long as it did to complete this necklace, strictly because that little container held a whole heck of a lot more beads than I ever thought it could...and it actually ended up that I ran out of string before I ran out of beads!  I love the look of these beads because the soft opacity of the glass and the bright colors make them feel like they are made out of little tiny pieces of sea glass.  The colors and the "sea glass" appearance make these beads reminiscent of warmer weather, something definitely nice to think about as a giant ice and snow storm approaches....

 

bead box when I just started...

 

bead box when I ran out of string!

 

In progress necklace strand....

 

Finished!!!

Fashionably Friday January 28

This week's Fashionably Friday is dedicated to a trend that I am personally excited to sport, which is the 70's inspiration making an appearance on runways for this spring.  Simple elements, bohemian flare, glam, bright colors, and even flared pants are making a reappearance.  Excited for the feel of these styles, I was cleaning out the basement the other day and I actually found pieces which are totally elements of this trend:  a macrame purse, and a flowy, sheer printed dress.  These were items left over from a box of things my mom dropped off last summer that I was supposed to take to Goodwill for donation, and kept forgetting about it.  Now, I'm lucky I forgot!  Because these pieces are so cute, and I can't wait to wear them!  Had I never cleaned the basement, I guess I never would have found them!  (So, yeah, I guess I'm glad I did that, too.) :/

Apparently my mom tried to sell this one for $1 in a garage sale....so glad it never sold!

Marc by Marc Jacobs

Marc Jacobs

 

Derek Lam

Altuzzara

 Marc by Marc Jacobs

Vintage and Blue Magnesite Necklace

This necklace for today was created with a big, white vintage medallion pendant that my Aunt Penny gave me, along with other pieces of broken bits of vintage jewelry that she had gotten from Estate Sales....I know she has a ton more, I want to go raid her stashes again!  It is so exciting to see the amazing things she really probably was going to throw away anyway, since most of the things I take from her other people would consider junk since they are just broken pieces or parts, but that's all I need to create my own design!  The chain is also a vintage piece pulled from her pile of 'junk jewelry'...hey, all the better for me, right?  The bead that I attached to the bottom of the medallion piece is blue-green magnesite, which looks similar to turquoise.  I also bought a string of these beads at the $1 sale from Fire Mountain Gems.  This piece, along with the earrings from yesterday, really gives me the feeling that spring is near...and I guess you could say I am getting a little case of Cabin Fever with all this snow and cloudy weather lately!  I need some sunshine, and temperatures in the upper 70's-lower 80's..... :)

Wire Wrapped Wednesday, January 26

Today I made a pair of earrings for Wire Wrapped Wednesday....Making necklaces is fun, but sometimes I want to "take a break" from necklace making and create something different.  Today, that happened to be earrings.  I used peach calcite beads that I bought from the Fire Mountain Gems $1 sale back before Christmas.  The gold colored wire compliments the warm tones in the calcite perfectly.  The earrings really give off a bohemian feel, and bring to mind thoughts of warmer weather.  I can't wait for these cold temperatures to end!  Bring on Spring!  I am dying to break out my warmer weather wardrobe.  I think these earrings would pair well with a beautifully printed dress and a great pair of summery sandals...ah, sunshine, how I miss you!

Thrifting Tuesday, January 25, 2011

This week I want to show you an outfit that I actually re-designed months ago.  I wore this top when I went up to visit Stacey Kay at Kent in November.  I just never really took pictures of it un  til now, and so here it is!  The original dress was a crazy 80's piece from Goodwill, with a 100% sheer skirt and sleeves and a dropped but funky waist.  I didn't like the sleeves or the wierd really short sheer skirt or the dropped waist look, but I loved the fabric, black with silver threads woven in.  I also loved the neckline and how there were little rows of buttons across each shoulder.  Shoulder detailing is a major trend right now.  To make the sleeves more modern, I cut them back to cap sleeves and left the edges raw for an edgy look.  I did the same with the bottom of the top, cutting off the weird dropped waist elastic part for good.  The result was a cute top that can be worn with jeans, heels, and a long pendant for a night out, or with flats or boots for a day of shopping or hanging out with friends.  The top has just enough sparkle to be ready to party, but not so much that you cannot wear it for a day look.

Saturday (Sunday) Sketches

Ok, this post was meant for yesterday, and I had so much going on yesterday that I didn't have time to post it!  (I spent half the day at Goodwill with my friend Jamie Fox)  :)...So today I will post what I meant to post yesterday...the sketched out ideas for transforming my friend Farah's bathroom.  I know, it is not exactly jewelry or fashion, but I was so focused on this project that this is the only sketching I did this week really.  Besides, I do love working on interiors!  Her current bathroom is small and dated, and she has had it in mind for some time now to update it.  I was over at her house last weekend, and we talked about it together, and she let me know things she wanted for the space and how she wanted it to feel, etc.  Armed with a list of what she expected in the space, when I got back to my own house I got to work on some sketching.  These are the preliminary sketch ideas for the space, attempting to include everything we talked about.  I have since put these sketches into CAD and I am playing around with dimensions of things and how things really fit together in the bathroom.  I may have changed some things from the initial sketches once I put them into CAD, but the sketches give you a general idea of my interpretation of what Farah wanted in the space.

Fashionably Friday January 21, 2011

Today’s Fashionably Friday is all about Spring 2011’s colors.  The Spring 2011 runways were full of bright colors…and by bright, I mean intensely eye-popping colors.  I am very excited about this!  Last fall, on a random Goodwill trip I happened to find this vintage Christian Dior suit…complete with shoulder pads, an asymmetrical button placket and hem, and guess what?  It is hot magenta pink and kind of like a pinkish-orange stripe.  It sounds crazy but the colors are very cute!  I have been waiting for a chance to wear the skirt, which is just a basic pencil skirt shape.  Now with the bright color focus for spring I can’t wait to bring out the skirt and wear it either with an equally bright top or to tone it down with black.  I have seen sooooo many images in my magazines and online of bright on bright outfits, and as cute as that skirt would look with black, I think it calls to be worn with something of similar brightness and intensity.  I think that would just make the outfit perfect!  I have a few tops in mind to wear it with, and I will have to get them all out and experiment to see which ones I like with it best.  And I will definitely be posting the winner here!  Until then, here are some images of the bright-on-bright combinations that caught my eye. 

(And I know I used the Dior necklace last week….but I can’t help it I love it!...It’s also the same colors of the suit I have)

 

Photos courtesy of Google Images

Cincinnati Art Museum

On Tuesday, during the misty rain, my sister and I visited the Cincinnati Art Museum.  It was a perfect day for staying indoors and looking at art.  I needed to go, because in my Art History class I am supposed to be writing an 8 page paper on artifacts that I was supposed to find and document while I was there.  It was like an art scavenger hunt that took me all through the Asian and Islamic art wings!  I almost ran out of time to see what I really wanted to see while I was at the museum, which was the exhibit Wedded Perfection, a display of over 200 years worth of wedding dress styles.  It was so amazing!  I loved the Zac Posen dress that was made up of red poppies!  I google image searched it because I had to show you all what it looked like....(See images below).  They told us no photography was allowed in the exhibit (my sister tried to take a picture and got caught.....that's how we found that out lol).  My art history professor told us that photography was allowed, though only without flash, on the pieces that we were supposed to look at for class so we just assumed you could take pictures of the wedding dresses too...apparently not.  But if you want to catch a glimpse of some of the dresses in the show, check out this blog, the blogger did an interview with CAM about the show, and has some pictures of it on there.  If you live in Cincinnati you need to check out the show!!  It's only in the museum through the end of this month, so get there as soon as possible!  It is free to get into the museum but parking is $4.  I am so glad I was able to go and check it out!

 

jewelry from 1790

 

the only photo  I could find of the Zac Posen gown!

Wire Wrapped Wednesday, January 19

This week's wire wrapped Wednesday post is a necklace that I made using a piece of pink wire I randomly found in my jewelry making supplies.  The interesting part about the wire is that it is actually 6 or 7 years old.  The wire was a scrap left over from my junior or senior year in high school when I made these wire wrapped candle Christmas gifts for all of my friends.  I was so excited to find it, and I had to use it for this necklace.  There was only a small piece left, and I used the whole scrap for this project.  I wrapped a piece of Italian onyx from Fire Mountain Gems as the main pendant, and then made it kind of into a tassel look with little purple beads dangling off of it.  The purple glass bead at the top also has significance, because I got that bead when I was in high school with my dad at the Pendleton Art Center down in over the Rhine.  My dad's friend Litsa used to own an art gallery there, now her gallery is Art Design Consultants near downtown Cincinnati.  We used to go to the old Pendleton building once a month for Final Fridays, a fun art event on the last Friday of the month.

Thrifting Tuesday January 18, 2011

The outfit that I have re-designed this week was a dress that I bought at goodwill.  It was a beautiful print in a large shapeless style with a giant and I mean GIANT hole down the back seam.  Seeing as how it was only $2, I bought it anyway to see what I could do to fix it, because I loved the sleeves and the amazing floral design, which I thought would be perfect for the Holidays.  I had it in my head for over a month what I wanted to do with the dress.  I wanted to take it in slightly, so it was a little more form fitting but still loose, because I enjoyed the loose look of it.  I wanted to fix the hole in the back by placing a big, black and gold jeans zipper down the back that I bought in the fabric store.  I just knew it would look great.  It would be perfect for Drew's Grandma's Christmas party.  I had been planning it since November.  Well, typical me I waited until the last minute to sew the dress, and this was also during my time of Non-Inspiration during my job-mental-breakdown fiasco, so there it was Christmas eve right before the party was going to start and here I was sitting at home with the old original dress in hand, not even having pinned it for fitting yet.  Rushed as I was, but still determined to get it done to wear to the party I enlisted my mom to help with the pinning and sewing.  Afterall, I thought, wouldn't two people be quicker and more efficient than one?  Well in our haste to sew the dress, my mother took it in too far on the bottom half.  I didn't really have time to try it on at her house, having to rush off to get gifts wrapped and prepare for the party and for spending the night at Drew's mom's house afterwards.  I trusted our original pinning measurements to be accurate.  Well, was I ever wrong.  At home, after wrapping what seemed like hundreds of gifts and my overnight bag and loading everything into the car, I got dressed and was bending over to put on my shoes when I heard the sound NO ONE ever wants to hear....rrrrriiippppp!  the dress split open up the side seam!  What was I going to do!? That was the outfit I had been planning for months!  And I hadn't even put the zipper in like I originally wanted to!  Having no time to change my outfit or really think about what I was doing I grabbed some jeans, threw them on, and tucked in the dress to create a holiday top.  It looked so cute!  And I still had the benefit of getting to wear the pattern that I loved!  It ended up being a win-win, and I was happy, though not 100%, with the outcome, and I still got compliments on the top!  No one ever even guessed that it had at one time been a dress!  Everything worked out well!  I don't have pictures of the original dress, or the altered one, but here are pictures of the "top" that I ended up with!

A Bit of Geometry

Today, the necklace I want to show you takes inspiration from a lot of the geometric statement pieces that are huge for Spring 2011.  I made the necklace out of the beads and pieces from a broken vintage necklace that I got from my aunt.  I loved the wooden look of some of these beads, as well as the bright turquoise color of some of the beads.  I arranged them in such a way that they almost remind me of something Egyptian, maybe the colors have something to do with that too.  And any one who knows me knows that I love anything Egypt, so I guess it makes sense that that would inspire me.