Jewelry Discoveries

It seems funny, or maybe I should say natural, that all of the things that I encourage students to do in terms of discovering their artistic processes also work as part of my artistic discoveries. I've been doing jewelry for Christmas gifts and have produced dozens of pairs of earrings, but started looking at and using "sea-glass" or "beach-glass" over the past week or so in some experimental pieces. I feel like these things were successful, and have led to even more discoveries around how I might use the rather large collection of glass that I have.

The photo below is an example of the fact that no two pieces of "beach-glass" are the same, but some are close enough to make a good "pair" of earrings. I liked these pieces because they were similar in size and have segments of raised letters on them, and they most likely came from the same bottle. I made the large jump rings to accommodate the holes I drilled in the glass, and then replaced the silver holding bead with a colored seed bead.

This series of photos partially shows the process I used to make rings for Jen and Lynne using pieces of rounded fused glass "stones" from my glass kiln. Make the bezel, fit the "stone", and then solder the ring and bezel.