Delia Stone’s Studio Labor Day Sale! 20% off for jewelry and 50% off for Tutorials!

To celebrate Labor Day I’m offering a 20% off sale to all of my loyal customers, readers and followers to thank you all for making it possible to live my dream. 🙂 You make cyberspace a warm and friendly place. You put food on my table and help me to provide for my family. You encourage me and add fuel to my creative fires! How can I not take the opportunity to show you some love? 🙂

In my Delia Stone’s Studio shop on etsy, you can use code LaborDay14 at checkout to take 20% off of any purchase. Why settle for just one? Christmas is just around the corner and the more you buy the more you save (says the evil sales lady :::wicked laughter:::). Check out my new Cloisonné mini beach scene pendants. You can get them at a steal for this deal. $67 to $75!

Follow this link to take advantage of the sale on finished jewelry: https://www.etsy.com/shop/deliasstones?ref=l2-shopheader-name

If you make your own jewelry, you might be more interested in my Tutorialshop sale on Etsy. You can take 50% off of any purchase by using the same code at checkout: LaborDay14.

Follow this link to take advantage of the sale on tutorials: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TutorialShop?ref=si_shop

Thanks for your patronage and kind encouragement over the years! Wishing you and your family a safe and fun filled weekend together!

A Look Back and Marking Progress

I recently found myself revisiting an old post, Fabulous Fire and the Quantum Karp,and it gave me cause to reflect. The post was made fairly early on in my cloisonné experiments back in April of 2013. I realized as I read that I had posed something of a question to myself. I wrote ” I cannot wait to see what my efforts over the next year will yield if I remain steadfast in my enameling experiments.” And so now, here I am, just over a year into my foray into enamels. So how far have I come? I decided that it deserved review.

My first cloisonné piece was a mermaid. Why I chose a mermaid I couldn’t say. I really was not a mermaid fan. Didn’t like them, didn’t dislike them, I could take them or leave them. However, over the past year through my enameling, I have become something of a nut for mermaids. My first one wasn’t pretty, but she had BIG boobs! She didn’t have hair. Why? Because I was afraid to try to add hair. I didn’t think I could do it. Keep in mind, I was terrified I wasn’t going to be able to make a successful cloisonné piece to begin with! I just didn’t have the nerve to take on hair too. Have I mentioned that I’m faint of heart? I felt I was being brave enough just going all Hail Mary on a cloisonné experiment I was sure was doomed to begin with, so I just moved past the whole daunting hair issue. I created the design with some scrap 20 gauge copper wire I had laying around. Rough around the edges to be sure. Some people couldn’t even tell she was a mermaid. I was still proud of her. She represented my foray into brave new territory, my pride in being able to move past my fear (no matter how loud that little voice in my head screamed ‘you can’t do this!’) and discover what I COULD do rather than fretting over what I didn’t think I could do.  This piece was completed in March of 2013.

So how far have I come? Pretty far, I think. My latest mermaid even has hair. Yes. I found my courage for that too eventually. 🙂 See for yourself.

Another one of my early pieces that I was proud of was the Quantum Karp.  I called him the quantum Karp because I felt that I had taken something of a quantum leap in my cloisonné when I went from my bald, big boobed mermaid to this little guy.  I was thrilled with how he turned out.  Note that I had a cloisonné wire frame on him as well (just as in the first mermaid). Why?  Because I was ever so foolishly afraid the glass would run off of the edges.  I laugh about that now, but at the time I was quite concerned. lol

Of course eventually I came around and realized that the glass would not run off of the surface.  So to measure progress I share my blue fish. Have my fish evolved?  I’m not sure about this one (outside of the fact that the blue fish doesn’t have signs of my silly drippy glass phobia).  The truth is that I like them both. My blue fish has less detail in the actual design, but my color shading is certainly better, whereas it was nearly nonexistent in my Koi.  What do you think?

As for my beach scenes have come a loooong way.  I’m sure you will agree.  I look back at my first one and it looks so clumsy, so … I dunno.  Ugly is the word I think I’d use.  I look at the orange and purple sky, and the blue water, and they two simply aren’t in unison.  It’s as if there is a sunset skyline paired with high noon waters.  It just doesn’t work for me.

 

I do, however, love my beach scenes in present day.  Not only are they far more pleasing to the eye, I’ve added little slivers of silver foil in the beryl blue waters to mimic movement in the waves and best yet – real beach sand from the gulf coast fired into the sand dunes.  Progress is apparent here, in my humble opinion.

And so, with the year in review I ask myself ‘what will my work look like in 2015?  Will I progress?  Will I look back at the pieces I am so proud of now and think again how far I’ve come?  The only answer I have for that is ‘I certainly hope so’.

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Get you own mini cloisonné ‘Peace of the Beach’.  Now available in my etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/listing/198904667/beach-scene-cloisonne-enamel-necklace?ref=listing-0

See what else I’ve been up to.  Are you a tree fan?  I am, and they’re beginning to appear in my cloisonné. https://www.etsy.com/listing/198884770/sunset-valley-handmade-cloisonne?ref=listing-1

https://www.etsy.com/listing/197894888/handmade-cloisonne-autumn-winds-necklace?ref=listing-3

The Creation of a Crabby Ring

I thought I’d share some pictures of my most recent custom order. Do you remember my first Crabby ring? I do, and I soooo loved him. When I was at a show I would repeatedly pick him up to admire him. He had so much character I couldn’t resist. And then a few minutes later I would go to check on him only to have panic strike my heart when I couldn’t find him – and then I’d realize that I had unconsciously put him on my own finger instead of back in his spot. I would have to force myself to put him back on display … and then, he sold! I have missed him every day since then. I recently received a custom order for another Crabby ring. I took a few pics along the way (trust me when I say the pictures display a much abbreviated version of the process) to share with Kelly who commissioned him and thought I’d share them here with everyone. I couldn’t find the initial pics, but they begin here with his fourth firing (after counter enamel, base coat and the firing which secured the wires in place). When it was ready for me to begin laying color down, I started with his body and his tiny eyes.

After a couple of rounds on the body and eyes, I began to lay down the first coat of the light blue.

Here’s a picture of him after a few rounds of the light and then darker blues, along with a little more orange-red for the body. I used my stone to grind him back to a flush surface and shape the edges for a smooth bezel.

Here are the components (less the ring shank) before soldering. The base, the bezel wire (already soldered) and the jewel itself. In my first attempt to solder the bezel to the base, I melted the fine silver bezel wire. ARRRGGHHH! Frustrating. So then I had to deconstruct and reconstruct the setting with a new bezel wire. Finally, the setting was ready. Now all I had left to do was solder the ring shank to the setting. First, I tested the fit of the jewel in the final setting. The dental floss is put behind the jewel before I pop it in to test the fit so that if you have a good fit (the stone/jewel sometimes doesn’t want to come out – and I still had to solder the ring shank on) and I had a very good fit. So tight, in fact, that I actually broke the dental floss when I tried to pull the jewel out. That resulted in about another 40 minutes of fiddling to successfully extract the jewel so I could move on to the next step. I didn’t think it was going to cooperate for a little while there …

And the final ring, shank included.

I adore him! Okay, no bias there, right? LOL What do you think of my little Crabby ring? 🙂

Would you like a custom piece all your own? Then check out my shop on Etsy! https://www.etsy.com/shop/deliasstones