lo and behold

I love this organization:  Beads of Courage.  They describe themselves this way

Beads of Courage helps children RECORD, TELL and OWN their stories of courage during treatment for cancer and other serious illness. Through the Program children receive different colored beads each which symbolize their unique and challenging treatment journey.

Some of the beads are handmade and donated by glass beadmakers. Others are the simpler, more common beads that children everywhere string by the hundreds, fascinated and delighted that they can decorate themselves with handmade jewels.  The idea behind Beads of Courage is so right:  beauty with meaning; telling stories; marking time; invented ritual; celebrating children; reaching out to those who are most in need; facing our worst fears.

One day I want to help start a Beads of Courage program at my local hospital. 

Right now, Beads of Courage is in the running to win 25K from Pepsi with which they will fund three new sites.  They  need to be voted one of the top ten “great ideas” at this website.  They are currently ranked 13 and voting ends on July 31. Will you please stop by and give them a click?  It would be awesome if they won.  

I found each of the artists I am writing about this week through her blog.  And this person, Beth Hemmila, of Hint Jewelry, routinely stuns me with her beautiful and honest writing. Off the top of my head, I remember a recent post about having an open or closed heart, and another about the “every woman’s complex relationship with food.” Both of these posts articulated challenges that are well known to me. Beth shares openly about her failures, her lifestyle, and her business. 

On her blog, Beth describes her jewelry business this way: 

wild west spirit meets far east design :: handmade silver jewelry connecting people through simple beauty, pure craftsmanship, and common stories

On her Etsy shop, the banner says, Stories in Metal. Primarily, her work is making silver charms, mostly out of PMC, and some also in sterling.  Each carved and cast charm has a picture on it that symbolizes a part of the life force – those are my words, not Beth’s, but I think that’s the idea.  Here are a few of the charms that speak to me. The photos and the descriptive text are borrowed from Beth’s Etsy shop, with her permission. 

Prana, mighty life force and healer, come swim next to me in the borderland. Open my body to spaciousness and touch the places that hurt so as to lead me back to the sound of myself — the feeling that sings without knowing why.

Hummingbirds draw on the essence of flowers, extract sweetness from life, and show us the way to find joy in any situation. They are a symbol for celebrating a life fulfilled as well as losses in the form of loved ones and dreams. Deeply woven into the mythology of the Americas, hummingbirds are often considered tiny messengers between worlds, helping shamans keep the balance between spirit and nature.

A tree of life “to evoke the earth’s healing powers of creation, nourishment, and protection” and matched with wire wrapped gemstones in the colors of the seasons. 

Beth sells the charms individually and also uses them in lovely, luscious pieces of jewelry.  She makes some to sell (like the tree of life above), some on request from customers, and this year, she is building herself an “heirloom memory necklace.” Each month of 2010, she is adding something(s)to a necklace that remind her of that month.  I can’t imagine the time she is investing to write and draw and think about her life so beautifully and intentionally.  This is what her necklace looked like at the end of May 2010.

I can’t wait to see where it goes, and I LOVE reading what Beth writes each month about her process.  

As you might imagine, I am very drawn to this whole idea. Poetry in jewelry – that’s an interesting juxtaposition for me, as I feel that my poet self coming back alive but in a different medium.  I love the idea of making necklaces of this type as gifts.  And for myself, I could make a birthday necklace and add something each year.  Or, I could start a necklace now which I could continue to build until I am 50.  It would be a piece that represented the period of my life between ages 45 – 50 in which I feel I am re-birthing myself, or revising myself, or transforming in some powerful way (I don’t have the words yet – maybe something visual will help.)

If I got myself a birthday present from Hint this year, I think I would start with the Tree of Life.  . . . I would certainly add something glass that I have made, and something beaded.  Fun to think about.

I also want to hold Hint in my mind as a model of business.  I noticed that Beth gives away 10% of her sales to a different “good cause” each month, something that I did when I started my Etsy store.  I also wonder if I will find a way to bring meaning to the beauty that I am learning to create in glass.  I’ve thought about it, and sometimes certain ideas come up.  I think I’m getting closer that that ideal, but I know I will have to stay open to the desire and put the time in to really tease it out.  That’s a very good goal, and Hint is an excellent example. 

I am not going to do an in-depth report card like I have for each month this year.  I am going to do a quick review of the month, and the “semester,” and then “my personal fake grad school” is going on summer vacation.  Which is not to say that I will not continue learning or growing in my artist-identity, or that I am going to stop blogging, but that the pace is going to change -  because that’s what summers are for. 

And I feel it, anyway. It has already happened. My stance relative to the project has shifted.  And I cannot (nor do I want to) fight against the movement.

When I started this idea in January, I felt like the blog and the prospect of “being in school” would push me, keep me accountable.  And it did.  I pushed hard.  I kept the belief that I had to move forward on many fronts:  reading, writing, thinking, meeting people, almost elbowing myself into a community and into way of life. It’s a hard thing that I am trying to do, and it would be easy to stop and stall,  or tiptoe and retreat, or to try and then run away scared. But I did not – and do not – want to treat my transformation timidly.  I am nearly fifty years old.  I don’t have the time to be anything but serious.  

So, I traveled to Austin, TX in April and to Millville, NJ in May to take what for me felt like “master” glass classes.  I spent serious time and money absorbing what I could from great teachers.  And now that I have had a big dose infusion of other people’s greatness, it is time for me to incubate.  I need some quiet time with my self and with my “new flame” as Steve calls the torch.  I have been very true to my hour-a-day regimen and it feels great.  But instead of pushing, my job now is being open and receive what the glass has to offer me. 

The one push I need to still focus on is getting my torch set up in a studio that does not need to shut down when the New England winter rolls in.  I have done some preliminary thinking about how to safely set up in a finished room that already exists in my basement, and when I came home from Millville, I thought I had the answer: natural gas and an oxygen generator. It’s a true basement – no windows. At all. But still, it’s a large room, and I began to imagine what color I would paint the walls, and how we could improve the lighting, and what kind of shelving I’d like. . . I was feeling excited about it.

And then, in the last week, the universe delivered me two options for studios outside my home in shared space with other artists.  One is about 10 minutes away in the next town over, and one is literally about a mile away.  Both have pros and cons, and on one of the spaces, I will have to make a decision in the next week.  Each has a story that I will share soon;  for the moment, I am trying to be open and discern what I am meant to do. 

June is a transition month: the kids finish school.  It’s my birthday.  Some years, including this year, we take a vacation at the end of June to sort of launch the summer. 

July and August are going to be about my physical space here at home. The traveling is done, including that I cancelled my registration to The Gathering.  I will feel a longing, I know, when it is going on without me, but I also know it’s the right thing for now.  By September, I will have the room of my own that I have been waiting for and longing for.  Not shared with Steve.  Not the guest room. 

And then, I think another burst of energy will come with September.  And what – I’ll be a sophomore?  A senior?  LOL! 

Almost every glass teacher I’ve had says, “Make 100 spacers.”

In the class, they try to get to you to make 20 or 40, tell you that the best way to get better at home is to make spacers until you can make them with your eyes closed. The basic shape and application of a spacer bead is the foundation of all other beads, they say. 

I actually agree with them.  And I believe this approach to learning will work.  But I haven’t ever done it. 

In the classes, they say, “Make them quick. Get the glass on and move to the next one.  Not going in the kiln. Doesn’t matter if they’re good.”  The idea, I know, is to burn it into muscle memory:  the size of the gather, the touchdown of the glass, the roll of the mandrel and the swipe of the taper at the end.  And then, heating the glass, getting it balanced, and cooling the bead without losing the shape.

It’s not simple. 

For a while, since I got back from Austin I think, I’ve been trying to torch an hour day, rather than wait until I have enough time for 3-hour-kiln-running session.  I start with a mandrel of two or three black spacers, and then I move onto the one or two other beads I am going to make that day. 

I use the black spacers in necklaces I make, and I have gotten much better at them.  If I make three on a mandrel, usually the first one cracks.  I can’t quite manage the heat/cooling thing. 

But last weekend, something new happened with my simple spacers.  At the end of my rare 6-hour session at the torch, I was tired, and decided to make some colored spacers instead of my usual black ones.  I was using pretty thick mandrels – 1/4 inch I think.  And suddenly, I made a spacer that was lovely.  Bigger than the black ones that I usually make.  Something about the size of the mandrel, the thickness of the spacer, and the weight of the bead was in perfect proportion.  Like a cheerio.  And, later, when I got them off the mandrel, I was delighted to see that they were all the same size.  Actually, I measured.  They were within 1 mm of the same size.  That counts. 

The next day, I sat down for about 45 minutes to make just cheerios.  And look:

You can’t imagine how satisfying it felt to produce this little handful of blue perfection.  It looks like nothing, like so simple, but being able to do this is a huge leap in my skills.  Eventually, the fact that I can do this will be buried deep in my glass beads, but it’s like the alphabet.  After you can read  books, you forget that at one time you didn’t even know the letters.  But it you hadn’t learned the letters, you wouldn’t be reading those books. 

I’m gonna go make some more!  And, I’ll bet I get to 100 pretty soon!

Yes, I’ve still got a thing or two to say about beads, even though it’s been a while. 

When you make a bead a day, they start to add up.  Pretty nice collection, eh? 

Nothing particularly exciting or original, but I am enjoying being focused on process and being freed from product.  I try a new color combination, or a new shape, or a new frit.  I pulled some encased stringers today – with quite good success, I might add.  I sit down, look at my glass, and usually decide to make something completely different than what I thought I would make a few minutes earlier when I walked out to the garage.  I love that.  It feels like play.  I usually make two or three beads.  Takes me an hour and I feel very satisfied when I’m done.  I know I’ll be back the very next day.  And then, hopefully, on Friday or the weekend, I’ll get a longer session, three or four hours.  I feel like I’m growing, but I don’t feel rushed.  Sort of new for me. Sort of lovely. 

I don’t like gardening, but I do like gardens.  I live in a neighborhood filled with big pines and mossy yards and few lawns – a challenging gardening environment for even the most dedicated.  Vegetables are pretty much out, but some of my neighbors have succeeded in cultivating beautiful beds of shade plants that flower and bring color and thrive in our little bit of wilderness. 

We have lived in our house for 11 years (actually, it’s exactly 11 years this month!), and every few years I’ve made a half-hearted attempt at growing something pretty in a little patch of dirt by our front door.  I put in bulbs which flowered for a while, and now they come up measly green stalks but no daffodils.  I put in a bleeding heart plant and it comes up every year, gets four little pink hearts on it, and goes away.  It never gets any bigger, and it’s really pretty sad looking.

Last year, I decided to give it one more wholehearted try, a decision I’m sure is related to (midlife alert!) the fact that my 10- and 7-year-old children no longer need the daily watering they once did. And, in fact, they even helped.  I got compost from my friend’s house and bought some, too.  I dug up all the dirt and laced the richer soil throughout.  I dug up some plants from the same generous friend and tried to really fill in the space.  I bought a few established plants whose color appealed to me. I  never really understood why a garden needed mulch or what it did, but I bought a few bags and threw it around. By the time I was done, at least it looked intentional.  It had potential. 

This year, I am delighted to say that most of what I put in last year has come back fuller, greener, and healthier looking.  The yellow irises (?) above have been in the ground for something like four years and flowered maybe once, maybe not at all.  The deep red astilbe that match the shutters on the house has started to bloom. I’m most very excited about the pink blooms on the wild geranium that I LOVE in the yards of others.  I bought something new called gentian.   

 We (the kids helped, at least for a while!) put down more compost, mulched again, and planted some of my favorite petunias.  Last year, my daughters went to an amazing arts and crafts camp and made word bricks as one of the projects. Now there is poetry in my garden, too. 

I’ve always said that I like making things more than growing things, and that children were the only thing I could keep alive (haven’t had even a houseplant since the first was born and the pet guinea pigs came only on the condition that they were Daddy’s project.)  But watch this space – I’m growing, and so is the garden! 

My 100th post went up over the weekend when I was in New Jersey.  No time to do it justice while I was on the road, but I’ve been thinking about how to mark this milestone for a while, so here it is:  the 102nd post in honor of the 100th. 

I’ve been trying to tell more people that I write a blog.  Like at the class in New Jersey, I mentioned it at lunch.  But then, when someone says, “Oh, what’s your blog about?”, I get sort of stuck.

“It’s about turning 50.”

“Really – when are you turning 50?”

“Umm, in 3 years.” 

And then I get a strange look, like what is there to say about turning 50 for three years?

Or, “It’s about my life.” 

And then there’s just silence. 

I could say, “It’s about becoming an artist in midlife,” but it feels pretentious.

I tried, “It’s about making glass beads,” and I have to admit - even at a glass class - this answer did not inspire enthusiasm. 

Instead, what ends up happening is I get into a long winded, twisty explanation about how I freaked out when I turned 45, and how all of my professional decisions of the last 10 years have been about prioritizing the care of my children, and now it’s all a big deal when I decide to go away for the weekend, and now I want to prioritize my creative life, and when you’re almost 50 and your kids are almost grown-up (comparatively, at ages 8 and 11) it feels like midlife and things start changing, so I started to write a blog . . . At the end of it all, I still feel like I sound flimsy and pathetic and no one really knows what I’m talking about.  I’m not looking to be talked out of that feeling or to be encouraged into feeling better.  It’s just my truth at this moment.

In any case, I like writing the blog, and I know there are a few people out there who like reading it, so I just need to get my elevator speech down better.  Or look at it a little differently.

I follow a lovely blog called Standing in the Shadows which is written by a neighbor of mine in the town down the road. In a recent post she reflected on her first year as a blog writer: 

I’ve also struggled with the fact that my blog—like my writer life beyond the blog—is not neatly focused upon one topic. I do not write about adoption or pink boys or the planet or reproductive justice exclusively. I’ve had to accept that I don’t quite fit in a single category and that this potentially makes for slower going (you know, in that writing career sense). At the very same time, I think I’ve accepted myself as a person whose interests and passions are varied. I’ve pretty much settled—almost more comfortably through this process of blogging—upon the fact that I write what I write and I’ll get where I get, which will be, uh, somewhere.

That seemed at the time I read it, and now, to be a pretty good summation of both my dilemma and my conclusion.  Thanks, Sarah. 

I have a few thoughts about things I might try in this blog going forward: 

• I may try to write more reflectively and less as documentation.
• I would like to write more about my children and my experience as their parent, but I struggle with respecting their privacy.
• I would like to write more about midlife – the body, the mind, the memory, the marriage, but here, too, I am not sure how personal and exposed I want to be, or if this is the place to do it.   
• I am so naturally a words person that I also want to use the blog to develop my visual side. I have the camera now and I want to add posts that are completely, or mostly, photos.
• I like doing giveaways and contests, but with the last one, I found that I am terrible at the follow through. I would like to improve that. 

And now, I hope you have read this far, because there are two presents to celebrate this 100th post celebration.  First, I have finally loaded up the LINKS tab at the top of the blog.  The other blogs listed are among the ones that I enjoy and admire.  There are more, for sure, and now that I know how work that page, I will add more as they come.  That’s my present to the blog (as if it is separate from me), and to the readers who stop here.

And to those readers who stop here – the ones who come once and the ones who come back – thank you. If you have never left a comment, please do.  I would like to meet.   

And lastly,  KELLA of Kella’s Creative Wishes.  I knew you had a blogshop but I hadn’t realized until just a few days ago that you have a bloggy-blog, too.  You have commented here more than anyone, and I am so touched by your interest and attention and enthusiasm.  Send me a comment with your direct e-mail and mailing address (I won’t publish them) and I will send you a present!  Just like that! 

Here we go – onward to 200!  I still won’t be fifty, but who cares?!

I had another great weekend learning, thinking, and dreaming glass.  This time, in Millville, New Jersey. 

After this class from Kristina Logan, following close on the heels of my work with Heather Trimlett and Jill Symons, I feel steeped in information and inspiration from the most skilled and talented glass bead makers I could find. 

I could not do it just from reading books.  I did not have the patience to work through trial and error for years to figure out all on my own how to move molten glass into the shapes and designs I see and can imagine.  I am not brave enough to hook up the gas first and ask questions later. 

Instead – and this was not a conscious and intentional plan from the beginning  - I have taken just the right classes from just the right people to now feel I have a solid footing.  

Five classes. Fifteen months:

• Intro to Flameworking – Sally Prasch at Snow Farm
• Into to Beadmaking – Nancy Tobey at  Snow Farm
• Encasing and Inclusion – Jill Symons at Blue Moon Glassworks in Austin, TX
• Buttons and Beads – Heather Trimlett at Blue Moon Glassworks in Austin, TX
• Beads:  The Next Level – Kristina Logan at Carlisle School of Glass Art in Millville, NJ

And now - I am so done. I know enough about theory and enough about practice that I feel grounded and ready to fly.  I can invent. I can build the walls and windows of MY house. 

I have been a sponge, and now I am going to be a hermit.  I am going to bid a grateful goodbye to my Hothead in the garage and set up a real torch in a real studio that I can work in year round.  A room of my own.  Finally.  

Kristina’s class was just the right one to end on.  (And I don’t mean I will never take a class again, but it will be a while, not like in the same intensity as this run. ) In addition to a full and open disclosure of what processes and techniques work for her, Kristina was also very wise and instructive about how to grow artistically.   She asked at the beginning what intention each of us had for the class. Some people said “to learn how to make your designs.”  Kristina was clear that learning to make her designs would not serve us (or her). Instead, her intention was that each of us would leave feeling that we could make our beads better. 

Here’s an example. You know how I love these dotty beads, right? 

Well, they started because of how enchanted I was to see opaque dots on a transparent round of the same color.  Originally, I used an even paler transparent gold so the opaque really stood out.   Something about the bare wisp of transparent color together with the deep rich opaque of the same hue just delights me to no end.  In Kristina’s class, I made “my bead” this way:

Three rows of dots:  big, medium, and small.  Kristina, “the queen of dots,” taught us about control of size and placement, and see – I could take my bead to another level.  I don’t love the bead I made, but I now have better skill with dots which  gives me a new freedom when I sit quietly and alone in front of my own torch.  (Yikes, look at the difference in photo quality between my old camera and my new one!)

There’s much more I could say, and I will, but for now, a few more photos of the weekend. 

We couldn’t take the torches outside, but we spent a few minutes in the sun learning how to prepare a rivet for the hole of a bead. 

from overcast and chilly Massachusetts

across Connecticut

through New York

over the Tappan Zee Bridge

past the Delaware Memorial Bridge

around Philadelphia

and south.

Here’s where we’ll end up: 

Called Mix and Match because of all the different borders, the makeshift number/letters, and the multi-medium composition! 

Sisterly cooperation is the best present of all!

As always, a beautiful and creative presentation.  Tasty, too!