Mail Day Madness

Here's today's photo dump. Is this gunna get boring? Personally I think the answer is NO NEVER. Because everyone loves studio shots and supply lust. 

Here's the textile rope I made yesterday- I'm pretty sure it won't end up like this, I'd like to do some wrapping and some beads n stuff, maybe dye it so it's more brown and less blue/grey. It's a pretty big piece, hung with some kind of super-chunky cluster pendant.

This is me mucking around with cluster pendant ideas. Big ol' iron ring from under the ground in Eastern Europe, Russian deer antler, African cattle pendant, tropical ocean shell, various beads of a rustic nature.

 

I had a huge mail delivery today (everything comes at once!) so right now, my desk is covered in all these gorgeous big tribal rustic chunky things. Vintage pit-fired clay beads of exceptional size, deer antler tips; those brown and white mega-chunks are sea pottery fragments, they're destined to be statement necklace plates, warrior stylee.

Giaaaaant beeeeeeeeeead!! 

Here's some suuuuper awesome cattle charms from Ethiopia- these are the real deal, proper old; not the thin replicas you get from everywhere. To be honest I don't think the people who sold them knew what they were. They're all grungy and thick and wonky. Perfect. 

The flat bluey things are slates, from the shores of a Scottish ocean. I imagine these are fragments of cottage shingle. I love stuff like this- the secret history that lies within this object...what was the building it sat on? What scenes played out under these stone slices? How did they come to be in the sea?

I like the way their chalky blue sits with the textile rope, so I might end up making a pendant from them for this rope instead of dyeing it to match the spear/shell set-up. The slates make a glorious tinkling noise when they hit each other, like a windchime. They're pretty tough too, having bobbed about in the ocean for so long, losing their fragile layers and smoothing off their fissures so they're just a solid core. You could almost say these were the bones of slate.

Do you know what these are? Bone! No. Fossil? No. These are....... omg omg omg.... 

TEAPOT SPOUTS!! For reals, yo. I bought them from the same shop as the slate; the girl who runs it is really sweet, and she lives in an area of Scotland that produced a lot of ceramics. She finds her stuff on the shoreline. Apparently the area made a lot of teapots...but I especially love how these have a faux bois pattern on them, it's perfect for my ideas about place and primitive versus advanced culture. I'll tell you about that in another post.

Just some cute bits, cause little things still count. The bird is carved from horn, I think it's native American.  

Fly like an eagle... (good name for a song!) 

And it was while photographing all this junk that I found my new background for listing pics. I don't think I'm going to list these earrings (there's a crack in the driftwood I want to deal with) but I do love the antique tribal contrast of knackered cloth book cover and woven grass. 

 

 So that was my day -well the creative portion. I did some extra domestic stuff so that tomorrow is free to tinker. I am actually looking forward to it, when I have nothing to do except sit at my desk and make things. I am finally, finally...finally...happy to be making things again.