Acorn Earrings

With fall at our doorstep, I wanted to share these earrings I made last year. I was waiting for my family to pick up me and staring at the ground where there were these adorable little acorns.

I stuffed a bunch in my pocked not knowing what I'd do with them... they ended up being just about the same size as beads I had at home so I popped the top off and drilled a small whole in the top.

Then took a beed pulled it together with the cap.

I think they look cute and are a nice fall touch of whimsey...

G Clef Earrings

While I wasn't blogging... I was still being creative. I can't really turn that creativity thing off and survive.

I did manage to document a few projects, not always the process, but often the finished pieces. So I'll be posting a few of my favorites... these in particular I've remade on more than a few occasions so perhaps one of these times, I'll pull together some pictures of the process.

I ended up taking orders for this last Christmas through friends and family. For some, I went with a distressed hammered look, others wanted them smooth.

The most challenging part of these was that I love wearing what I make, but I'm not musical at all and it felt wrong to wear a symbol of music while having NO musical talent at all.

Baseball Bracelet

I have a baseball boy... he would eat, sleep and breath baseball if it worked. He loves all sports, but baseball really is his love.

He's also fidgety little thing and with second grade starting next week I was hoping to make a bracelet that he could fidget with in class that would be less of a distraction. I had 2 ideas for bracelets, this is the one I thought he'd like best so I started with it.

It is really quite simple, all you need is a baseball and knife of some kind. Each ball will yield 2 medium bracelets.

Very carefully cut around each side of the stitches. In design school we had to cut boards, mattes and all kind of materials, they taught us it was better to strike several light cuts than to try and muscle through a material with a single cut. Cutting a ball seemed like an opportunity to take this advice and not end up dragging 2 kids to the emergency room to have my thumb reattached. Thankfully, no thumbs were severed during this project.

Then peel back the leather from the ball. I started with the larger sections which made the sections with the laces much easier to remove.

This is where I got confused. How on earth did they tie the knots of the red laces INSIDE the baseball. Mind blown.

Untie the magic laces and begin to unravel them.

Then cut the leather so you have one long-wavy snake... If you work with the leather to warm it up, pull it straight, it will relax some of the curl. But after just 2 hours of wearing the actual bracelet there is hardly any curl left in it anyway.

Continue unraveling the laces until you have about 2-3" of thread at each end. Then cut the leather in half and unravel the laces at the other end.

I used a safety pink to attach the bracelet to my jeans so I could braid the ends of the laces together.

And then tied the bracelet on my boy... who I thought was going to be thrilled. He was not.

Thankfully, it seems to be growing on him a bit and I have caught him fidgeting with it, which is just what he's supposed to do... Hopefully he'll stick with it and save his second grade teacher the torture of trying to deal with my fidgety britches.