Tin Heart earrings

I love it when a piece comes out as nice as you pictured in your mind!

monday night progress

We worked in the studio for a few hours after dinner and did quite well. Bryan got the new bird backings cut, WITH beaks. I was able to get all the pieces cut,drilled,sanded and oxidized for the tin heart collection. The hard part now is to put the right chain with the pendants, that can make or brake it.

The Weekend's Progress and Set back!!

This weekend we got a second workbench for the studio and started creating some nice work stations. Bryan and I can actually both be down there comfortably now and thanks to his electrical skills last weekend we can SEE better!

I have two old doors that were left in the house when I bought it so thought I would use them to create a wall between my studio and rest of the basement. I eventually want to etch our Amuck logo on the glass.

Now for the set-back! I went downstairs last night to photograph all the birds I've been working on this past week. When I got upstairs and started looking at the photos I realized that I had forgotten to cut the bird's beak on all the copper back pieces!! I can't believe that I got all the way finished with that layer without realizing, now I have to re-cut each of them. I'll keep those pieces and later on come up with a different bird design, probably with a sterling beak. I'm starting to feel really panicked by all the work I need to get done before the Brookside Art Annual. I also have a one day art fair the weekend before the Brookside show.

Also in the works right now is an exclusive line that I am making for STUFF in Brookside. It's going to be such a bright and girlie line, here are some of the little posies for one of the collections. They are made from copper,coffee tins,cookie tins and sterling silver. My goal is to have these pieces finished this week.

WOW!....

My studio has never looked so good! Not that it's cleaner, because it is certainly a mess, but its brighter. Bryan put in four new overhead lights for me on Saturday, what a difference.

Here are some pieces that I got cut out this week. Took them to the coffee shop with me this evening and got all the edges filed and sanded.

These are the tiniest skulls I've ever attempted, think they will be extremely cool earrings! We had such a great weekend, hope you all did as well. We went to the auto show friday evening and checked out pick up trucks( really would be safer way of transporting my gas tanks for the studio!) Then saturday we went to a cat show and met with some local breeders of Maine Coon cats. They are such gorgeous creatures. We lost our Hawthorn kitty back in Sept. and it just hasn't been the same around the house. He was part Maine Coon and we are absolutely in love with that breed now. So, hopefully this year we can add a new kitty member to the household.
We had another exciting possibility come up this weekend having to do with our jewelry, will keep you posted as we learn more.

Look what arrived in our shop!

These packages arrived in our shop last week, my mouth hit the floor when I walked in and saw them. They are HUGE!
It's Hoops & YoYo. They came to our store to make an appearance in our new kids department.
It was quite the ordeal to get our volunteers in the costumes. We learned after the first showing that it was way to difficult to get them through the doorways so we put the heads on them in a quiet corner of the store.
Still trying to get the heads on..
A little guidance through the store...
Aren't they the cutest! They are my favorite Hallmark characters. If your not familiar with them you should check out their e-cards on Hallmark.com.  The days of the week are hilarious!!
This shot really gives you idea of the scale of the suits.
Gina and I just had to put the feet on, then of course we had to walk over to HR and do a little Pee Wee style dancing in front of their window!
The head on the floor was just screaming for me to get a photo and place the caption" I've fallen and I can't get up!"

New Earrings

Worked on some new earrings this weekend, these are nice casual everyday wearing with your jeans kind of earrings. The hearts are cut from a Missouri license plate and the red dots are from a stop sign.(Available in my Etsy shop)

Got my new acetylene/air torch hooked up this weekend and Bryan and I went out today to buy some duct work to install a hood vent that has been sitting in the studio for a few years now. We're starting to rearrange the studio so that we can both be down there working at the same time(without bumping into each other) and it's just really time to get that area organized.

I'm working on a lightening bolt necklace and will be asking for your input on this in the next day or so. We came up with a couple of bolts and can't decide which shape we like best.

Time for a walk and a little coffee to end up this Sunday!

Kid Oh!

Here is the reveal of the new children's department that we've been designing/installing at work for the last couple of months.
We partitioned off the space to keep things top secret before today's grand opening.
Fitting rooms were installed to what was a stock room.
A little paint going up on the walls and pine nesting tables being given a new look with bright paints.

VOILA! A fun new department for kids.


This is the entrance into the fitting rooms. We decided to do a fun display in this case and made jewelry out of candy.


We padded out a grey formica cash wrap with white vinyl, very chic!

Birthday

Today is Bryan's birthday so I tried my hand at making corndogs(one of his favorites) and they turned out GREAT! I only have a small deep fry so I had to cut the dogs in half, I just called them party size corndogs. Bryan was a little worried about how they would come out but right after the first bite I could tell by his face that I had done good. Whew!, what a relief because it probably wasn't a good idea to try something new for such a special occasion.

I carried on the theme with one of his gifts and got him this cool letterpress print from Amy over at PSPress. She has some really nice work in her Etsy shop.

I was going to blog about the new children's dept. that is opening in the store tomorrow but in my haste to leave this evening I forgot to snap some photos of the finished project. So, I will be showing all of that thursday evening and probably more on Friday. It was a huge project, turned out great, was fun to work on, glad it's finally done!

Talk with you tomorrow night!

Ready to mail

Our application to NYIGF is all packed up and ready to mail out tomorrow, YAY! It feels so good to have gotten this all put together and a month before the deadline even! Now to sit and wait with our fingers crossed. While I'm doing that though the next item to get done is to send in my earring project and instructions that were accepted by Lark Books for they're upcoming book called 30 Minute earrings. That will be so exciting to see one of our pieces actually published in a book. We are feeling very fortunate this year.

INTRODUCING.....

ROGER & BLITHE

They finally have names! I've never been good at naming my artwork and now that we've been putting together an application for the NYIGF Bryan and I decided we'd better get a name attached to each piece of jewelry. This will make it easier to order items from the price sheets we are putting together.

These two got their names while we were sitting at the coffee shop( Those of you who live here in Kansas City and know us are probably laughing out loud right now!) as we tend to do quite A LOT. If we're not at work or at home we are at the coffee shop, what can we say we get lots of ideas when we're there. So, back to the names; I was having a mocha called the Jolly Roger and we both thought immediately: ROGER! Of course that's a perfect name for a boy skull but what now for the girl! I pulled up the thesaurus and looked up the word JOLLY and then came up with BLITHE.

Here they are posing for their portrait, how cute!