They are downright breathtaking. Like jewels.

The random but nicely symmetrical scattering of design is something I can fall to pieces over. This is what I love most about people like Renee Lalique (and there is a lot to love about the dude, my link is but one paltry example; do a google image search and be blown away).

All models had these austere head-dresses covering their hair and ears. This one has a feather mohawk (I have a complete picture of the mohawk down below) but most were just the head covering.

Pretty textures. I like the scrunchy rough texture of the gauzy translucent bunched fabric (I’m sure it has a name) and then the smooth silky weight of the outer layer (look at the veiny texture). I have an affinity for crazy contrasted with constricting. (No alliteration intended.)

O. M. G. I Love This. Are they real feathers painted gold? I would love to think they were actually gold feathers. Or even real feathers sprayed with real gold paint… From a jewelry standpoint, they have a look like gold (14K or maybe 18K) patinaed with age. You so rarely see gold patinaed but I love the look and have been experimenting with it myself.

I’m freaking out over the print of skrinkled drapey fabric over perfectly smooth silhouette. Funny that it makes even real folds and shadows incorporated into the art. (You see the wings?) This is where I start to flail over which one is really my favorite…

…because oooh oooh oooh oooh ooh! How cool is this?!?

Holy cats! Or this?!? The dress goes on to be light and foamy and fluffery through the full-length skirt.

Heavy pomegranite silk. With intricate gold embroidery. I love this. Seriously, this would take me a zillion years to make (…if I knew how to sew and embroider and all that).

Here’s that headdress I was talking about. A golden feather mohawk!

And right at the point where I get super excited about this artist—I do the same thing when I discover a great new-to-me author, and go to search out what other books have been written and enthuse over what is to come… And then I remember that the man who created this is now dead; there is no more coming. It’s a sad, depressing thing, and makes you wonder what goes on in the minds of brilliant people. I don’t often get choked up over people I didn’t know personally who have died (there are very, very many, after all). But it happens.

All images and many more (plus greater detail) from here.

[Underwater Photograph by Fosco Maraini from his book, Hekura, The Diving Girl's Island.]

I’ve had pearls on the brain lately and it got me to thinking about the ocean, diving, books and movies with diving scenes… specifically, the traditional Japanese women divers, called ‘ama.’

The scene I recall most vividly from a movie is the one from Tampopo. The gangster is at the seaside in his stylin’ cream suit where he sees a young ama, cold and dripping, climbing up onto the rocks with her basket of oysters. She offers him one, he cuts his lip…

I love the last bit where you see the other amas watching from the waves. (Incidentally, if you have never seen this film, you really should—and not just for the oyster porn.)

In another movie scene that comes to mind, the ama are treacherous. The hero dives into the water and encounters a group of them. They surround him and pull away his mask (ama dive without air). There is a strange gang-mentality/siren/dumb-playful group of seals sort of thing going on; they are not specifically trying to kill him but rather just messing with him. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what movie this was. A Bond movie? I know that Kissy Suzuki was supposed to be an ama but I didn’t think I had seen that one.

[Photo by Fosco Maraini.]

Ama traditionally are free divers, almost exclusively women, who dove for seaweed and shellfish (like sea snails, abalone, lobster, oysters). Occasionally the oysters they dove for contained pearls but this was not their goal. Interestingly, it wasn’t until Mikimoto was trying to promote his pearls did he hire ama to “dive” for pearls as a propaganda stunt. Actual be-loinclothed women were a bit too shocking for his upper-crust clientèle, and yet, the image of naked young women wrapped in semi-sheer white fabric free diving into the cold tumultuous ocean to capture the very pearl you wear upon your breast was a compelling one. Mikimoto was a total fucking genius.

[Japanese Ama as realized by Mikimoto. I have to say though, I'm liking the loincloth with the big-ass knife/pry-stick look better.]

Up until the middle 50s-60s, they dove only in loincloths. Then they wore the head-to-knee white outfits you see popularized by Mikimoto. Nowadays real working ama are interested in wearing whatever makes them most visible to boats, which usually is bright orange. Other than that, ama still dive for shellfish and seaweed as they have for 2000 years, with no air and no wetsuits. Obviously, diving with full scuba gear would allow them to stay down all day but they choose not to go this route. Depleting the shellfish population so rapidly would be harmful not only to the environment, but to their own livelihoods. They have struck a rare balance that has endured throughout the centuries and into modernity.

[Harvesting Seaweed, 1956, by Iwase Yoshiyuki. For more amazing photos by this guy, go here.]

[Seriously, my ass is getting kicked just sitting here looking at this photo. Photo by Fosco Maraini.]

“Water temperatures on the Onjuku coast are bearable only between June and September. Large harvests were impossible to haul up in strong currents, so tides had to be favourable, limiting diving days to about 20 per year. Ama dive in three sessions a day, requiring extensive eating and warming at the fireside between runs. A good daily harvest required 60 to 80 dives of up to two minutes each, so ama had to develop and maintain substantial body fat to guard against hypothermia. With such rigors and risks, ama were paid enormous salaries, often making more in the short season than the village men made the whole year. In the late 1920s there were around 200 ama active in Onjuku and the seven harbours of the region (Kohaduki, Ohaduki, Futamata, Konado, Tajiri, Koura and Nagahama). By the late 1960s, they had disappeared.”

I took the quote from here—an interesting read—but I can’t actually find the original author. Here’s a brief and very good article about ama.

["Around the Fire," 1931, by Iwase Yoshiyuki. Ama warm up between dives by a fire on the beach.]

I find it intriguing that free diving in cold water is something that most men simply cannot do; generally speaking, women’s bodies can handle cold water stress and mild hypothermia better than men’s. It was, and is, intense, dangerous, and backbreaking work, yet these women love to dive. They are real-life mermaids, every bit as mysterious and powerful and otherworldly as the mythical ones.

Of course, I spent hours and days obsessing over my interview questions and then suddenly the deadline was upon me and I freaked, quickly made sure I didn’t have any grotesque spelling errors, and just sent it in. Now I’m all, ohmygod: I forgot to say this, I should have said that, and I totally sound like a spazz!

Anyway, I’m very excited and also a bit nervous. Will anyone even read it? Will people actually go look at the things I make because of this? I have no idea what to expect.

ps – I would have put a pretty picture at the top if my computer hard drive didn’t die. And Joshua’s computer’s power supply not give out. Or my studio computer’s monitor go bad. All in this past week. I’m running linux now off a bootable disk. Anyway, you’ll have to be content with some krazee kapital letters and excitable punctuation in the header.

[18K white gold and diamond ring.]

My grandmother “Mimi” died a number of years ago and though we never lived geographically close, we were close in the way that grandmothers and their granddaughters are. I idolized her and thought everything about her was mysterious and magical.

Mostly I have all those homey odd memories about her that I collected over my childhood. She had curly white hair and wore enormous bifocals. Her house always looked exactly the same, year after year. Her bathroom was all porcelain and tile and felt wonderful on your feet as you walked in off the carpeting. She was a master knitter and all her knit things (we always got something hand-knit for Christmas) smelled a certain way—Woolite, my mother told me it was, which she hand-washed all her knits in. Her cooking was heavy on the baked goods (as a grandmother’s should be); she made these wonderful cookies every Christmas (Mexican wedding cookies) that were always just OUT on a table for anyone to snack on throughout the holiday but they contained nuts and as desperate as I was to eat them all, I actually disliked walnuts so much that I only ever managed to get through one or two. She lived in Tucson, AZ, and drove a car that had over the years all but disintegrated from the UV exposure. She loved the song by Stevie Wonder that went, “I just called, to say, I love you. I just called, to say how much I care…” and when I was in sixth grade it played on the radio all the time. We’d turn it up in the car and she’d sing along in her warbly voice.

It’s funny how when you are a child, you have no concept of other people ever having been young. Or that they once had a different life other than the role you know them in, namely, “grandmother.” I always thought it odd that my mother was so testy around her.

I only know snippets of her life now. She was born in a town in the midwest and spoke only German; she didn’t learn English until she was sent to school. She worked as a nanny when she was very young. She married an abusive alcoholic (my grandfather, a man I never knew, but who was a very well-respected lawyer) who was much older than she was. She never had a job after marrying until after he died, when she suddenly had, like, four—and she did a lot of volunteer work. And her hair was actually not naturally curly; she had it permed.

After she died, my mother (the only daughter) was given her wedding ring. It was old and worn and bent so she sent it to me to make something with, using the diamond.

This was a photo of her from her first communion, I think it was. Anyway, I had never seen a photo of her in her youth. Old photos are always so interesting—the people with their rigid expressions and fantastic outfits. When they are of your own grandmother in her early teens, well, I was pretty fascinated.

The whole feeling of that old photo of her inspired my design for this ring, from the ruffles of her dress and the off-tint color, to the art deco era. My mother now wears Mimi’s ring.

Now I understand it was only a small piece of her that I knew. A fragment. I don’t find it sad or think it’s a bad thing though; her life was her own and I’m grateful to have participated in the parts that I did.

And this:

To THIS!!

The first five boxes always get packed flush with essentials in no time. The following three boxes are somewhat less organized. Things get plucked from here and there and packed together out of convenience so that there aren’t any voids in the box. Then you survey the surroundings and there is still always like seven boxes’ worth of crap stacked all around and you don’t really need it but it’s still Useful Stuff and you can’t really just throw it out. I hate those last seven boxes.

The last time I had to pack up my studio, it was a bleeding nightmare. Not only did I have all seven boxes of utter crap I felt obligated to cart around to my Next Destination, it was all oblong, breakable, and awkward crap. I hate that awkward crap. Plus I had a humongous table (among other large items) to get rid of. Nobody was biting on Craigslist and in the end, I believe we cut it in quarters with a saws-all and balanced it precariously on top of the overloaded dumpster. Tragic really. When all was loaded and done, we came back to the house to discover that our car had been sideswiped (and totaled, it was later determined) by a drunk tow-truck driver (who later refused to ‘fess up). Although it was annoying, we weren’t really torn up over it. We were done with that car.

This time it went smoothly. I only had two boxes of crap and one I was able to pack back up again and hide away for the next move. If I’m lucky the closet fairies will steal it away and I won’t have to ever deal with it ever again.

Behold! More gratuitous jewelry studio shots!

[Main work table, the "Tall Cosa" with tiny drawers of all my tools and bits..]

[The Soldering Shelf. This new space has about fifty berjillion outlets in it. Everywhere you turn. In fact none of my furniture fits against the walls because of all the outlets sticking out. I think I've done a fair job populating them with a wide variety of electrical devices. Before, I played musical chairs with the two outlets I had.]

[The computer desk and project table. It's relatively neat and tidy now but in no time this will be taken over with all my miscellaneous bits and half-finished pieces.]

Anyway, I’m ready for action! I have a number of new pieces ready to post to the etsy shop. All very exciting!! (if, uh, you are into that sort of thing

When I found The Guy With The Turquoise at AGTA I totally started vibrating, I was so excited. I probably spent an hour poring over every stone even though I ended up buying the three papers I picked up initially. I ended up with 100 grams of turquoise. That piece up above is so cool I had to get it. It’s going to be a monster ring, most likely; that thing’s easily the size of a peanut butter cup. It looks like some sort of infrared Japanese water lily pond.

My mom came in for the spectacle the first day and we met up with Alisha. We all sort of drifted from one huge fancy color diamond booth to another for a while before shaking our heads and trying to remember what we came for in the first place. The AGTA show is so freaking huge it’s hard to know where to start.

Winding down on the last day of the show. Note the strict business casual dress code. I was in jeans and looked more presentable than most of the buyers. I guess the suits come for the first few days of the show only. I come for the sales on the last day.

A godawful waste of pearls if you ask me. The lady went on about how long it took them to find so many matching pearls to build this wondrous monstrosity.

Aaahh, that’s much easier on the eyes. This is Empress Marie-Louise’s tiara. Originally it had emeralds instead of turquoises but it was purchased by Van Cleef & Arpels in the 50s, they removed all the emeralds, and had them replaced with Persian turquoise. The emeralds they reset in modern-style jewelry and sold off as pricey little nuggets of Napoleonic history. I find it interesting that the turquoises are really unmatched in color. I wonder if it was always so or if some of them turned more greenish over time.

Some of the booth folk were not interested in me taking photos of their stock (corporate spies are everywhere) but these guys didn’t care. Here are many many sparkling sapphires. There was a LOT of this sort of thing going around.

As the show neared the end, vendors were either brain dead or really chatty about their stock to people clearly not buying $13,000 stones. This guys brought some of his trapiche emeralds out for us to ogle. They are just so damned cool. Really intense green and so much clearer than you usually see emeralds.

The gem show is in Tucson so we stayed at my parent’s house out in the desert near Rio Rico. I snapped the obligatory out-the-car-window shot of the ominous clouds.

Joshua stopped the car for me here. The cloud shadows on the dusty mountains looked really cool. It started raining as we drove in to Tucson.

Since we’re big tough Pacific Northwest types, we walked in the rain in between venues (along with nobody else). I was amused to see this skate park built in the concrete drainage ditch. This is right near the Convention Center. Go skater punks!

New ring in the shop! It’s made from three plates of silver riveted together (no solder at all).

It looks awesome when the sun shines through it; it makes little rose shadows on your hand.

In other news, I’ll be going to the Tucson Gem Show in a couple of days. It’s the largest gem show in the country, in the world possibly? At any rate, it is massive; the entire town of Tucson is descended upon and taken over by gem, rock, and fossil types. There are venues set up all over town, some typical convention-hall places or large temporary tents set up for the occasion but others are in various motels. The string of motels along I-10 transform into a crazy marketplace; people vending out of their rooms. You wander the halls, going into any open door. Beds are shoved up against the walls and folding tables are set up with lights and glass cases for the stones. You can see into the bathroom nook where there are always personal effects like coffee cups, makeup bags, electric shavers, toothbrushes, rumpled washcloths or towels sitting out. I always feel awkward when I see such things because I remember that they have been living in this room for the past week. They actually sleep in the bed underneath the table.

The goods range from dusty rocks and fossils or mammoth tusks to fat glittering diamonds and sapphires and rubies. There are tables piled two feet high with hanks of pearls. Buckets (literally) of lower-quality cut sapphires, amethysts, garnets, citrines. Some venues are just in parking lots and others have security guards, only letting certified in-the-business folks inside. These venues actually have a dress code, a thing that totally freaks me out since I have very little in the way of non-denim and t-shirts.

One of my favorite stops is the Flamingo Hotel lounge downtown where the Native Americans show their work. This is not so much a rock venue but rather a finished jewelry and artwork show. You walk into the hotel lobby and the light is dim, there are smudge bundles burning, wooden flute broken up with an eagle call here and there is playing in the background, and a bunch of surly old dudes loaded down with serious turquoise jewelry stand over their work. A lot of the jewelry isn’t really my style but some is truly awesome. It’s always worth checking out.

I’ve been on a rose carving kick lately. This is the most recent one I’ve done. It’s my current favorite. My newest ring is always my favorite. This one I carved freehand (i.e., no sketch beforehand, no measuring, no plans, etc.), which worked just fine since it’s not exactly a complicated design.

This is another recent one I did freehand—just started hacking away at a scrap of ring blank. I think I started on the actual wax a couple of years ago but never got farther than blocking out a size and width; I don’t even remember what I intended to carve.

So dainty!

So not! This is a massive, honking, behemoth of a ring. It took me so long to carve that I felt like casting it into silver would have been ridiculous; $5 worth of silver in a ring that took me 20 hours to carve. Just how do you price stuff like that? So I had it cast into 18K gold (happily back when it was around $400/ounce). It’s really over-the-top but I love it. A big snarly rosebush for your finger.

The stone in it is a boulder opal that I bought from a couple of dudes (brothers) who own and work their own mine in Queensland, Australia. While I was admiring his stones, one of the brothers entertained me with bawdy miner stories. He joked about how his brother (who was off getting lunch) was a total wuss when it came to snakes and spiders (seriously, who wouldn’t be; the number of deadly poisonous beasties that creep and crawl across the continent of Australia is staggering) and every night, having passed out after drinking his weight in warm canned beer, the wuss brother would find himself desperately needing to get up in the night to pee. After lying in agony in his cot until he couldn’t take it anymore, he would proceed to wake everyone in the tent with his swearing and flashlight flashing and banging of his boots against the ground manically attempting to dislodge any deadly scorpions or spiders. Then, lightning quick, he would dash outside to the nearest tuft of grass to relieve himself and fly back to his cot and be in his sleeping bag like his ass was on fire. The other brother laughed himself hoarse telling the story until finally the wuss brother returned to the booth with a couple of Indian tacos, eyebrows raised wondering what was so funny.

I’m thinking it would also be totally awesome to have little 3-5 point diamonds set around some of these bands. Maybe 5 or 6 stones bezel set. Course I need to learn how to set (faceted) stones…

Actually learning to set stones is totally my goal for the next few months. Except using the word ‘goal’ makes me feel like I’m on a job interview for an entry level position at some massive financial firm being asked by a doughy middle manager in an ill-fitting Structure suit, “What personal goals have you set for yourself?” or “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Those are the two lamest questions ever and I always hated them. Probably because my answers were always along the lines of: “Goals? I don’t need no stinking goals,” and “As a rule I do not plan more than a week in advance, but I can tell you now that I sure as shit don’t see myself HERE.” Sadly I never did answer honestly to those questions and I always got hired in the end.

Anyway. The point of my post? Not a team player. Also: likes roses.

Pantone 15-5519 (i.e., turquoise) is color of the year! I can handle it.

A per usual, my lameness makes my life harder: I had to resolder the same points no less than three different times after leaving this pair of earrings in the pickle overnight (and each pair has four different solder points).

[Nice dead plant, by the way. Go me!]

My point: TWELVE SOLDER POINTS. The pain.

Good thing I have such a kick-ass torch or else I might have had to kill myself.