Simplicity

Even before the blog, I knew that one of my main design themes is simplicity. I am drawn to simple themes and shapes, over and over again. Today, I had a lunch date with some friends that I haven't seen in a while. We've been mainly keeping in touch by Facebook lately, so I knew they would expect to see some jewelry. I didn't want to get a whole "show-and-tell" together, but I didn't want to show up with nothing. I approached my craft desk and saw the large beaded ring that I made in a class during the Bead & Button Show. It's just supposed to be a part of a bigger necklace made up from three sizes of rings - a fun project, but fussier than something I'm likely to wear myself. I slid the Turkish silver charm off my old standby plain silver necklace and put the ring on it. And I LOVED it! What a happy accident!

And this evening, I put together a couple of the discs I've been playing around with over the last few days. I love the mix of metals (copper and brass). I'm using a gel form of liver of sulfur and it looks like I need to play around with the mixture. This time, I watered it down, but it still turned the copper a really dark color that was stubbornly resistant to removal by polishing. In fact, I put it in the tumbler for more than four hours and it's still this dark. I like it, but I'd like to figure out how to get something between super-shiny copper and almost completely black. More experiments to follow!