Thursday, October 22, 2009

Day of the dead hand chain



I have decided to enter a piece into the fantastic challenge on the Objects and Elements blog. This round, the challenge is to put something unusual in a bezel. I had a couple cool hand-carved skulls, so i was ready with some ideas. I really love reading and seeing all the challenges, and this time I decided not to sit idly on the sidelines.

I was currently making a piece of jewelry for a friend back home in Canada's belated birthday, and i was going on a 'Day of the Dead' theme after seeing how awesome these carved bone skulls looked with metal roses.

The bezel form was from a stuff-swap with the lovely Amber Dawn. In the bezel i put a handcarved korean skull surounded by three metal roses(echoed later in the wrist part of the chain, more pics to come). The background is simple scrapbooking paper, and after aranging everything i filled the bezel with resin. I then drilled four holes through the resin and bezel to fit it into the formation as needed.

I really encourage any of you to pop on over to the Objects and Elements blog challenge, as the voting starts tomorrow October 23rd. Good luck to all the participants!

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Etsy Metal Challenge

There is a challenge blog I've found that is from various metal artists on Etsy. An amazingly talented group of jewelry artists joined as participants for a challenge that follows Project Runway's weekly challenges. Each week, they challenge themselves to create something following the theme of the week's show.

I was intrigued last week, where the challenge was to create a piece of movie jewelry in a movie genre. I chose Science Fiction for myself, and started to work on a piece in more of a narrative jewelry in a narrative with industrial (dare i say steampunk?) style. However, the piece was big and i didn't even get halfway done before the week's limit.

Luckily, the next week's challenge was to create something in blue. As i hadn't yet added any color and had just been working with metal, the change of all colored pieces to blue was an easy one. So, the plan was to have this as a guest submission to go with the others.

This plan very sadly didn't work out as i was 3 HOURS LATE!!! for the submission deadline. I had planned to work on it friday night (korea time) in order to finish by the deadline but then went to a jazz festival instead of finishing the piece(still worth it). sigh. Maybe next week i'll be on time? I'll be leaving a quick comment on the post saying that I finished the challenge but was too late.

I thought i'd post this piece anyways, as it is finished and photographed. Also, it's been a LONG while (almost a month!) since I last updated and I knew I needed to get on posting this or it would be just set aside.










As I mentioned, this is a narrative piece of jewelry. When I was designing for the movie challenge, I decided that this would be for a girl who had been part of a royal family. Her family were murdered by her evil aunt, but the girl managed to escape (kind of like Anastasia?). The girl ran off, and pretended to be a boy. She lived with a blacksmith family for a while, but was found out. She managed to escape again, but the blacksmith family was sadly killed. The girl, who has grown into a woman, swears revenge on her aunt.

I'm not sure this is really a sci-fi movie, but it isn't really historical fiction either.... It almost has some elements of an adult fairy tale type movie?? I don't know where it really fits. Still, each element of the necklace has an element of the movie within. The two tear shaped blue dangles are for her parents. The key was to her old bedroom. The picture is of her mother. The three iron pieces are for the blacksmith family. Lastly, the scraps of blue fabric are from her aunt's dress, to remind her of her purpose.

I had a lot of fun making this piece, and definately learned a lot too! Not quite sure what I will do with it, as it isn't exactly the standard type of piece people wear out on the street or to work, but I'm not your usual korean on the street here anyways! Maybe I'll wear it out and about anyways, and love the looks that it draws.