Finally!

Ok, I am giving away this necklace and earrings tonight if I have to deliver them myself! lol. There were 35 emails and I numbered them in the order they came in. Random.org drew number 7. Lucky number 7 is Gianetta Palmer! I have sent G and email. We are over halfway to 500 Likes on Facebook now. When we hit #500 I will giveaway something else.

Giveaway...Third Times the Charm

One more time for the necklace and earrings. Here is the giveaway prize...

Random.org drew the following number...

 

Number 143 in the Facebook Likes list is  Katrina Winant. If that is you, you have until 6:00 pm ET on Tuesday, November 27th to email me at kristi@bgfdesigns.com with your address for shipping it to you.

Giveaway, Try Number 2!

Ok, so the winner of this necklace and earrings did not contact me, so I am trying again. Back to random.org to draw a number and this time the winner is...


Number 20. Number 20 on the Facebook like list is . If you are the winner, you have until 5:00 p.m. tomorrow, Monday, November 26th to email me at kristi@bgfdesigns.com with your address to mail out the necklace and earrings.

Giveaway!

It is time to celebrating going over the 400 Likes mark on my Facebook page. First, I want each and everyone of you to know how much I appreciate you. In the year's time I have been doing this, I have met so many wonderful and nice people. I love interacting with all of you on Facebook and I really appreciate that you like my jewelry and designs. Now on to the giveaway...
To celebrate going over 400 Likes, I am giving away this necklace and earring set. The pendant is fused glass wrapped in dark annealed wire. The necklace is a variety of different jaspers and silver plated accent beads. The earrings match the necklace. For the drawing, I just numbered everyone in my Likes list in sequential order and used random.org to draw a number between 1 and 432 (which is the number of likes at the time I drew). And the lucky winner is...

Number 67 and that is                 , you are the winner and you have until tomorrow, Sunday November 25th at 4:00 pm ET to email me at kristi@bgfdesigns.com and give me your address so I can ship it out.

Thanks again to everyone! And, don't forget, I will do another giveaway at 500 Likes.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with their friends and family.

Bead Soup Party!

I participated in a Bead Soup Party from Kalmbach Bookstore. A couple of weeks ago I received this wonderful package in the mail with beautiful beads and findings from Eva Sherman at Grand River Beads. Now, how to put this all together into beautiful jewelry.

I had to think about it for awhile, but eventually it came to me. Since I had a beautiful butterfly and flower to work with, I wanted something very nature inspired and flowing. I combined all of this with some antique bronze and titanium enameled wire and some brown suede cord and here are the pictures of what I came up with:

I hope you like them.

300 Facebook Fans Drawing

Well, tonight is the night. I have to say that I am rather surprised that only 7 people came to the blog and entered the contest. I know that quite a few more people came to the blog and viewed the post about the contest, but did not enter and I am not quite sure why. Any messages or emails on why you chose not to leave a comment to enter would be appreciated.

Anyway, here is the list of names of those who entered the contest. Thank you all for participating. I appreciate the participation and the nice comments you left me. I put your names and numbers together based upon the order you left your comments in. As I always do, I went to random.org and had it pick a number. And, the number is...

Number 2! That would be Amy B! Amy, please send me a Facebook message and we will work out the details of the piece that you want.
Thanks to those who participated and thanks to everyone who likes my page and my jewelry!

Yay! We hit 300 Likes on the Facebook page!

We have reached the 300 Like milestone on the Facebook fan page! I would like to take a minute to thank each and every one of you for taking the time to like my page, read my posts and respond. It really does mean a great deal to me. I am very fortunate to be able to do what I do. Being able to have an artistic release is such an important part of my life. I spend a great deal of time working with technology and teaching, and working with glass and wire gives me much needed time away from that.

On to the drawing. I have decided to move this contest to the blog so that I am not in violation of any Facebook rules (don’t want to have my page shut down). So, here are the rules for getting entered into the drawing. The winner of the drawing will win a piece of jewelry (up to $45) of their choice. It can either be from my Etsy store, or if you have a piece you have seen on the Facebook page that I haven’t listed yet let me know. In order to register for the drawing, you will need to leave a comment on this post here on the blog to let me know you want to be entered. You can comment by clicking on the Comments link at the bottom of the post. I will run the comment period from today, August 18^th, through next Sunday, August 26^th. Next Sunday evening and 8:00 pm ET, I will assign numbers to everyone who left a comment and use random.org to draw a random number. I will then do a blog post and announce the winner’s name. You will then need to either leave me a Facebook message or email me at kristi@bgfdesigns to claim your prize.

If you have friends that you know also like the Big Grass Farm Designs Facebook page, make sure they know about the competition. I never know who all is seeing my posts with the new Facebook pages post rules. Best of luck to everyone.

Blog Buddy Beads

Ok, ok, ok...I know I have been extremely lax in my posts to the blog, but it has been somewhat boring around here. School, school and more school has taken up all of my time again. I will be so glad when this term is over and summer will be here. Conversion to semesters will finally happen in the fall and hopefully I will have that all under control.

Anyway, on to the main point of tonight's blog post. As I posted on Facebook earlier in the week, I won Magpie Gemstones Blog Buddy Bead Giveaway. Szarka Carter is the proprietor of Magpie and also a wonderful jewelry artist. You can see her work at Szarka's Artisan Couture Jewelry. I have "virtually" known Szarka for awhile now because we belong to several online jewelry artisan groups. I purchase some of my supplies, in particular gemstone beads, from Magpie and the quality is wonderful. For my jewelry making friends, I highly recommend Magpie, and I am happy to do this promotion. For my friends who love jewelry, please go check out Szarka's page. There are tons of lovely things to see.

Now on to what I did with my beads. If you checked out my Facebook page earlier in the week, you saw that I received what is in the picture on the right. First, is an abalone mosaic heart pendant and along with it is 2 strands of laboradorite beads. I wish my camera was better so you could see all of the wonderful colors in the pendant and beads. (For any family members who might read this money for my birthday to contribute to my camera fun would be great! Hint, hint. lol)

So, these all screamed out for sterling silver filled wire. First, I wrapped the pendant (no no, you don't get to see that yet). It needed to be hung on black suede cord, but you know me its not just plain black suede cord. Once I finished the necklace, I made a pair of matching heart earrings. Hearts made out of dark annealed wire with sterling and laboradite accents.

So here is the necklace on its embellished cord.

And, here is a close up of the cord.

Here is the set together.

I hope I did justice to these wonderful beads. Thanks Magpie Gemstones for picking me!

The Total Package

It has been awhile since I made a post. School is killing me this year. We have tons of changes...new classroom software, semester conversion, evaluations, assessments, grant, new course. It seems to be sucking the life out of me right now. Creative time has been fleeting, but I have managed to get a little bit of time in. I go crazy if I can't make something after awhile.

Since I'm getting very little creative time right now, I am doing my best to maximize the time I do get. I have been working really hard lately on stretching my creative abilities, going outside of the box, and trying to look at the total package. I think it has been a worthwhile exercise for me. I can see more growth and skill in the pieces I have made lately. I have never been one to achieve a goal and be perfectly satisfied with it. I am constantly driven to get better and to learn new things (this could explain why school is sucking up so much of my time as well).

Since my glass and wire wrapping skills have been getting better, I have been trying to stretch myself in the design area by looking at the total package of a necklace. I haven't been satisfied lately by putting my pendants on a cord. I have felt the need to make more dramatic pieces. So, I have been experimenting and testing my creativity in how I create the necklace portion of each piece. I've had some successes and some failures, but I am definitely learning a lot. These pictures are some of the recent pieces I've worked on.

I hope everyone likes the new pieces because I am having a thoroughly good time with this learning process.

For all of you who are having craft show withdrawals since the holidays are over, the Appalachian Artisans Guild Cabin Fever show will be coming up in March at the South Campus of Southern State Community College. I'll post more information on this later.

Photography Love!

Well, it finally came. I received my portable photography studio on Monday, but because of school I hadn't been able to play with it until today. It is so neat, because everything stores in this portable case with a handle. This case is actually what pops up to become the studio.

Everything I need came with it. The case opens up and their are 3 walls that you open up. It has black, white, red and blue backdrops, 2 lights and a camera tripod. The 2 side walls act as filters for the lights. You set your lights outside the walls and shine them through  the walls to filter the light so that you get less reflection on the objects you are photographing.

I had two initial pendants that I recently wrapped that I photographed today to try it out. The first one is this letter B initial pendant:

It is black fused glass and green dichroic glass, wrapped with gun metal colored wire. The top picture shows the true green color of the dichroic glass and the true dark silver color of the wire. The picture on the wright shows the correct green color of the dichroic glass, but the wire color has a slight yellow look, so I should have probably moved the lights slightly.





The next photograph I took was of this letter M initial pendant:

This piece of dichroic glass is more of a blue/green/silver color depending on the way the light hits it. The color of the glass in the photographs matches the color of the glass in the actual pendant. However, the wire color in the pictures is lighter than the actual antiqued bronze color that it is. So, again, I probably need to adjust my lights.

I did edit these in Photoshop, but the only edits I made were to crop the pictures, reduce the file size, and brush out a couple of dog hairs that Cheyenne has already donated to the studio that I didn't see when I took the picture (lol). I didn't do any color correcting.

Overall, I am really happy with the set up. Glass is notoriously hard to photograph because of the reflection on your light source. Having this set up is much better. Here is one of my previous pictures:

You can see much more of a reflection of the light source on the glass and the sterling silver, plus the heavy shadow behind it. I think that I will get better as I practice with it and experiment with placement of the lights. I can already see that is going to save me lots of time with photo editing and color correction.

I apologize to everyone who just wants to see jewelry for going on and on about the portable studio. But, I know my jewelry making friends are always looking for input on tools to make their photographs better.

Feeling Retro...

I'm not quite sure why, but over the holiday break I had this strong urge to crochet something. Now, I used to crochet all of the time, but I literally haven't touched any of my crochet hooks in years. I do have lots of yarn because sometimes I use it in the kumihmo (japanese braiding) I do for jewelry.

Anyhow, I went upstairs and dug through all of the junk in my work room and found my crochet hooks. I figured since it is winter and getting cold I would like to have a nice, warm infinity scarf (if you are a guy, and you don't know what that is, it is a circular scarf with no ends...lol). A nice, simple, single-crochet pattern that wasn't too taxing since I hadn't done it for awhile. I finished it up yesterday during the Bengals game (boo!-they lost, yay! they're in the play offs anyway). It was great because it gave me something to do and I didn't have to haul the wire, tools, beads, and glass downstairs to watch TV.

Here are two pictures of the scarf. As you can see, I wasn't happy with just the scarf. It needed a pin to go with it and I obliged (it always comes back to the jewelry, doesn't it?). I think it turned out very nice and I can't wait to wear it. I also have an idea that I might put a couple of scarf/pin combos in the Etsy shop. What do you think? I need some input on this.