Soldering . . . it's not just for jewelry

So the other day my son told me his sister's Star Wars light saber wasn't working. I reacted in a "whatever" kind of manner, meaning: 1) I was busy and couldn't deal with it right then, and 2) but it's probably cheap plastic and can't be fixed anyway. Well, my son opened it up and passed it on to my husband. He took one look at it and said, "Honey, can you get your soldering tools out and try to fix this?"

Huh? You mean soldering isn't just for jewelry? You can actually solder, ahem, wires in other objects together? Leave it to a non-jewelry maker to think of this. He stripped the plastic off the end of the wire for me, and I got out the soldering iron. I snipped a tiny piece of solder. The tricky part was balancing the little piece on top of the two wires. I think the gel flux helped it stick. One tiny hit with the iron, and the solder flowed over the wires, joining them together. Voila! A saber that lights again. All is well in the universe.

Meeting Artists

One of the best parts about attending Portland Art & Soul, and probably most art retreats, is attending the vendor night. Instructors, local artists, and art stores sell their wares to the hundreds of attendees. I look forward to buying unusual art supplies and maybe a couple of small works of art.


This year's vendor night showcased the work of wonderful artists, and yet I didn't buy any art. The prices this year seemed outrageous for today's economy. Although even in a robust economy, a $500 painting is not in my budget. So I was pleased to discover quite a few artists' books for sale. To me, owning a book with beautiful photos of an artist's works is the next best thing.

I came upon a Portland artist named Jesse Reno. He practices "outsider art." He is untrained and yet very skilled. He uses acrylics and paints mostly on wood. Deep, rich colors are used to create fantastic animals and figures. The backgrounds contain words, symbols, and a variety of colors. He told me about an award he won at an exhibition in France.


Unfortunately, I can't afford any of his paintings. Thankfully, he's reproduced a good deal of them in a book. I'm now the proud owner of Jesse Reno's . . . book. Thank you, Jesse, for your interesting art. Here is Jesse and his friend, who is a talented fabric artist. Jesse is on the right.

Spontaneous Haiku Painting

I ventured outside of my norm, and took a painting class at Portland Art & Soul. I've done a lot of painting, but haven't had much instruction. Spontaneous Haiku Painting was taught by the wonderful Katie Kendrick. She's a very talented artist from Washington. You can check out her blog, which she calls Joyously Becoming. We were making a book from eight paintings, each painting accompanied by a haiku. Katie said that in the past, her students got so caught up with the painting, that they wouldn't have time to write the haikus. So this class we did it a little differently: for the first thirty minutes, we had the mission of writing eight haiku poems, one for each painting. I used to write poetry when I was in high school, so I guess it was like riding a bike for me. I cranked out eight poems easily. I don't know why I don't occasionally write poetry now. Maybe this will get me going again!

I wrote all my haiku around a beach theme, so I knew the color palette I'd be using for my paintings. The idea was to thin acrylic paint (Golden fluid acrylics) with water so you could drip, spatter, and flow the paint on your wet watercolor paper. I love the randomness and freedom of this technique. Since I mostly do abstracts, this was right up my alley.

After you paint the pages and let them dry, you take a look at them. What do you see? Any shapes or designs pop out at you? Katie sees a lot of animals in hers. I was all about the beach, so that's what I was seeing in mine.

I was going with a blue, sand, coral, palette, like you'd see at the beach or underwater. But after looking at a few paintings I had done, I thought it looked too pastel-ly. I pumped up the color levels with this one on the left. The haiku refers to an experience we've had in Siesta Key, Florida. Our family visits there for a week every summer. The residents (and tourists) celebrate the sunset every night. A group of locals come out to a specific corner, and as the sun is setting, they play drums and one woman plays the trumpet. They play the sun down.
The last painting in the book is the sun setting down.

Art & Soul

I finally feel my head is above water after returning from Portland Art & Soul. My cross-country trip left me in Portland time for a few days. But boy, was it worth it! This was my third trip to Portland for Art & Soul. Half the fun was visiting with friends I've met in the last two years, a lot of which I've swapped with throughout the year. You can feel very close to someone if you've exchanged emails all year, but it's fun to meet them or see them again.

About 16 members of our Charmsters group attended. I met up with most of them Saturday night during dinner. Here's a photo of some of them:

My Saturday class was Copper Enameling with Richard Salley. If you ever have an opportunity to take a class from Richard, you should make every attempt to do so. He makes bold, tribal-like pendants (or should they be called talismans?), and he is a generous, patient instructor. We saw his patience first-hand when a student laid a lit torch on the table and caught it on fire!

We learned to apply enamel to copper pieces. The class samples were leaves. I made my own leaf shape, rather like a heart. But I just couldn't get into using the red, orange and yellow colors of Fall, despite the beauty of the other students' leaves. I guess the Floridian in me, who never gets to see leaves change color, decided to gravitate toward blue. O.K., so these would never be found in nature. I like them anyway.

Jewelry of the Week

I made this pendant before I left for Portland.

The base is a strip of copper sheet. I torched the copper to give it a little color. I used cold connections to attach the copper wire and beads. I strung this on a simple black cord, rather than adding more beads. Sometimes pendants are stunning when just left as is.

Portland Bound

I'm heading to Portland, Oregon today to take art workshops at the Art & Soul Retreat. This is my third year attending. I chose a variety of classes this year: book making, enameling on copper, painting, and making a beaded bracelet. I'll post some photos when I return.

While in Portland, I'll be visiting my brother and his family. I'll leave you with a picture of a gift I am bringing them.

I made a wall hanging out of copper sheet. I cut the heart, hammered it, stamped the letters, then aged it with liver of sulphur. The glass beads were purchased at a craft fair

Vary Your Tastes

An art piece may contain many elements. Visually, there's color, quite often the more, the better. There's finish: matte, shiny, smokey, milky. Shapes and lines pull your eye to the different parts. Texturally, there's soft, hard, smooth, rough, cold, hot, sharp, blunt.

For this necklace, I wanted to introduce many elements by using various beads, wire, metals, and fiber. And so I call this necklace, Vary Your Tastes.

You can see all the colors I used from the mix of beads and the ribbons hanging from the pendant. This necklace combines hammered copper wire, torch-fired copper metal, different types of ribbons, and silver end caps and clasp.

P.S. The beads I used were from Beverly Gilbert's Coral Beach bead soup. Beverly has the wonderful ability of combining many colors, shapes and sizes of beads together to make a beautiful mix. She'll be showcasing her jewelry designs in her new book, Beaded Colorways, due at the beginning of 2010. You can visit her blog here.