August 10, 2007

• Pearlbamboo Was a Designer, Once Upon a Time

  After a five-year hiatus, I walked back into my jammed up studio, filled with ebay stuff, all beautiful, almost all, anyway, and excavated my worktable.  Boxes of freshwater pearls in gold and black cherry, turquoise, purple, iridescent peacock blue, a box of glass leaves, of glass flowers, little towers of beads made over a fire with silver foil inclusions, a microwave dinner freezer box full of glass beads I matted with acid and love, endless forgotten little bags and boxes full of treasures - I had forgotten I had the materials to make beauty.  

  I used to sell to places like the Duncan Phillips Collection Museum shop and that of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in DC, the shops for the Field Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago after I moved here, though I was never well enough during those times to develop a proper line and sustain my work for long enough periods of time to really develop a clientele.   But I also sold at Eastern  Market on Capital Hill when I lived in DC and found wonderful customers there - heads of Museums, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, adventurous women who loved innovations in form and my use of color, a young girl who had won her hometown spelling bee and wanted a necklace I had crafted as her gift from her parents for winning and making it to the finals.. 

  Chicago has never offered such a marvelous venue, but now there is www.etsy.com, ebay - where a few pioneers have managed to sell work for more than 9.99 - and the possibility down the road of a website.  So, I've begun to experiment with asymetrical earrings, something I had begun to do years ago.  Customers seem to have caught on to the idea now and so I will persue it, since I am totally taken by the design possibilities. 

  The pics below are not good - I'm going to use my Lil-built light tent to take better ones tomorrow, if it works as I'm assured it will.  And, in any case, these have been redone and expanded and reshaped a bit since these pics were made.   But rather than wait, here's a designer's equivalent of a poet's rough draft -

                                      

  This one's made with oxidized sterling silver wire and chain (I like it almost black), gold and garnet colored freshwater pearls, oxidized brass filagree beads and a four-point bead cap, a gold hand made glass bead with cream swirls, faceted garnets and a gold mother of pearl butterfly.                                      

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   Paradiddle, flam and ratamacue! and the beat goes on.

   

  Love to you all,

  pearlbamboo

   

  copyright, design, photos and text  e.p.hodges

  • 9:15 pm
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