Entwife Circlet, Revisited

Over the past two years, I've had the honor of making jewelry for several weddings. This autumn, a bride asked me to create an Entwife circlet for her. My side of the dorm room started to look like a fairy trove as it became laden with strands of wire, boxes of beads, and pinecones for two weeks. The end result? A woodland fairytale wedding headpiece.

The base of the circlet is braided raw copper, which should develop a beautiful patina over time. I twisted many of my favorite Czech glass leaf beads in various shades of copper onto the copper, accentuating it with some glass pearls.

But that is not all, my friends.

PARTY IN THE BACK!

The back of the Entwife circlet is made from real pinecones, more leaves, and strands of sparkling and rustic chains.

________

Two years ago (has it been that long?) a friend of mine asked me to create an entire jewelry ensemble for her to wear to a Lord of the Rings themed ball. She created an intricate Entwife costume, taught me how to make pinecone flowers, and left me to have fun.

You can see all of the tree-folk jewelry here, and a photoshoot with her costume here.

From this entire Entwife collection, the piece that I was the most proud of was the circlet. My fingers were so tired that I didn't want to do any crafting for days afterwards (gasp! --and, also, it's amazing how I've built up some serious finger muscles since), but it was worth it for this large Entish headpiece. 

The original version of the Entwife circlet. The copper is already patina-ed.

You can imagine how excited I was to get a change to re-create it-- with some changes to reflect my growing attention to construction details, quality supplies, and better techniques. Two years can impart a lot of experience!

I would like to officially thank my roommate for being a princess for an afternoon by modeling for me.

This entire crown took over 100 feet of copper wire to create! I spent several hours watching Netflix (Dollhouse, anyone?) and drinking tea while I busily slaved away at braiding and twisting wire. Unfortunately I had underestimated just how long it would take to make this piece, but thankfully even with all of my schoolwork I was able to ship it on time.

Pinecones do not like me.

First, I had to gather them. That is not hard on a college campus; there are several evergreens by the math building, and it was the right time of year for them to be blanketing the ground. The problem? I picked them up between classes, was on the receiving end of several odd stares, and only realized how sticky pinecones can be when I found that my notebook and sketchbook were glued together in my bag.

Then, I had to clean the pinecones. I wouldn't let that sticky mess anywhere near someone's hair. Plus, germs. Pinecones have to be baked to let the sap melt off-- that was an ordeal in a dorm.

Finally, I had to glue it all together and seal it. That part wasn't too bad at all, but it is when I am doing projects like this that I am eternally grateful for my roommates who deal with my weird projects.

When Spring unfolds the beechen leaf, and sap is in the bough;
When light is on the wild-wood stream, and wind is on the brow;
When stride is long, and breath is deep, and keen the mountain-air,
Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is fair!

-an Ent, in the song of the Ents and Entwives in The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

 

In the Lord of the Rings universe, the Ents are the tree people who the Hobbits run into in Fangorn Forest. The Ents are tree-shepherds, and the fate of the garden-loving Entwives is one of the mysteries of Middle Earth.

 

When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last;
When broken is the barren bough, and light and labour past;
I'll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again:
Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!

-an Entwife, in the song of the Ents and Entwives in The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

I hope that you've enjoyed these pictures! Making the circlet, taking the pictures-- it's all so much fun. :)

It's a Birthday Thing

 It's my birthday again! Head's up for the overly philosophical, pretentious, and extremely ramble-y un-edited post that I almost always make on my birthday.

This is one of my senior photos taken by my talented friend Jewels, who is getting quite good at using my camera. :) I also look really weird without glasses. 

For some reason, every year on my birthday, I start to get a little freaked out about the fact that, yes, I am, in fact, growing older.

I think that this is the sort of thing that bugs everyone who over-thinks and over-analyses life in general. In the midst of the partying and hanging out with friends, you pause for a moment and realize that time is passing.

It's a strange thing, if you think about it. Every moment is a moment that comes and goes, so why do birthdays make me think so much about time and growing up?

Insert random photo of flowers... because overthinking things makes me think of flowers

I'm one of those weird people who never, ever wanted to grow up. Sure, I loved the freedom I earned from the responsibilities I undertook over the years, but deep down I was Peter Pan. "Don't wanna grow up!"

Part of it was a bit of a prideful thing. As a child (and it is so strange to think that I am no longer a child, nor have I legally been for an entire year!), I was blessed with talent, dedication, and an encouraging family. I loved doing arts and crafts and science and writing and reading. Like everyone else, I appreciated and loved being complimented on the things I worked so hard on.

I always dreaded growing older. Not because I was a morbid kid with a gothic fear or fascination with death or even old age, but because I had this idea that anything I did at a young age was worth more than if I did the same thing when I was older.

So many people would say things like: "WOW! I can't believe you came up with something as creative and detailed as that and you are only 9 years old!"

"No way you drew that! What do you mean, you don't take take art classes? Holy cow, you are only 15?"

Sadly, I always did and still usually do make a point of telling people "oh yeah, I did this way back when I was 15."

While I know they meant well, and while I loved these sorts of compliments, I trapped myself into a weird mindset. I became convinced that my work became less impressive and less meaningful the older I got. To be brutally honest, I'd daydream of being a child prodigy. (This was especially bad one year after reading a book about Akiane, a painting prodigy who is only a year older than me and lived in my old town before I lived there. I wondered what I was doing with my life and why I couldn't be awesome like her.)

Today I am 19. This is the first birthday that I am spending away from my family. My new college friends have made my entire birthday weekend an absolute BLAST (and if I weren't in a really thoughtful mood at the moment, this entire post would be nothing but paragraphs worth of exclamation marks because my new friends are really amazing and sweet!!!).

I'm an adult now. I'm old enough that I could get married. I could get a regular job and live on my own. I buy my own groceries now. I'm in college, living in a dorm, and life is so surreal and exciting. I'm taking actual art classes and receiving training from people who are so talented that I am blown away and overwhelmed by their gifts.

And today, for the first time, it struck me how completely stupid my fear of growing up was. Growing up does not invalidate talent. Growing up does not make me less important. Growing up has, instead, made me realize that the world does not revolve around me, and that my goal right now is not to do amazing things and revel in compliments, but to attempt to be humble and learn. Other people are just as important, and in many ways are far, far more important. If I've been blessed with different gifts than many other people, I've been given these gifts to help others and to glorify God-- not to glorify me. I don't know everything and I am not good at everything, and being in college in the midst of new people, places, and ideas is making that really sink in.

Besides, even though I am growing older every second of every day, I never actually have to grow up. Growing up is overrated. One of my best friends came over a month before I moved in to college to take my senior photos. We started taking some cool normal ones:

But then we forgot that we were 18 years old and played dress up for hours and hours outside of an old cemetery.

I'm growing up to be a complete nerd, and I'm totally okay with it. As John Green says:

Graphics credit to ?. Via Pinterest.

As I was writing this, Jason Mraz came up on my playlist. I think the lyrics to this song are fitting, because they certainly fit my mood:

The world as I see it, is a remarkable place
A beautiful house in a forest, of stars in outer space.

And to make this be a triad of quotes:

  "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders." --G.K. Chesterton

So this year I am going to work more on appreciating life and being grateful. I'm sounding really cheesy and cliche, but right now I don't care.

Spock out.

The Tale of a Frabjous Present

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
He chortled in his joy.



I made this sculpture, designed by George Hart, for my brother's birthday. He wants to study mechanical engineering when he goes to college, but he's always said that his favorite hobbies will be theoretical physics and building fun contraptions in the garage.

In my family we kids don't usually spend money on birthday or Christmas presents for one another. I'm the only one of us with a source of income, and when there are six-soon-to-be-seven kids, none of us have the money! Gifts are always something cheap and handmade.

This particular brother is hard to make gifts for. He makes or already has most of the little things he wants, like 3D tic-tac-toe boards, levitating tops, or science-y desk toys. He even stole my M.C. Escher poster (I had only taken it down for the afternoon to move it to a new part of my wall!!!) so I couldn't give him that. He doesn't use crocheted hats or keychains or cute little painted cards. What to make?

We're all huge fans of Vi Hart, a youtuber who makes ridiculously geeky, mathematical, funny, and epic videos. One day I was re-watching her videos and stumbled upon her father George Hart's channel, and from there his website of sculptures. He's got a template for making the Frabjous sculpture, a geometric art piece which is totally up my brother's alley, so I set to work getting all my other siblings to help me out.

We traced the templates onto the stiff, thin cardboard that comes on the backs of sketchpads and legal pads. (I now have a lot of loose drawings in a folder instead of all attached in their pad, but whatever!)

While the rest of us slaved away, my five year old brother tried to make Sierpinski triangles! Isn't it sweet? Those fractal triangles turned into another distraction, and you can see my second-youngest brother's Sierpinski triangles on his Instagram here.    

And THAT lead to making hexaflexagons. Hexaflexagons are quickly taking over the house.

That cardboard was incredibly difficult to cut, but we finally managed it with box cutters. We spray painted everything black and let it dry overnight.

George Hart's PDF didn't have much in the way of instructions, but I naively assumed that I would be able to assemble the sculpture with ease. I mean, I'm one of those people who leave instruction booklets at the bottom of the box and just figures out how to put things together. Easy peasey, right? Hah.

This thing was hard to put together. I took a solid two hours puzzling the S-curves into the cool star-vortex pattern.

My aha-moment was realizing that the final shape is basically a dodecahedron and that the S-curves go diagonally to different vertices of the dodecahedron.

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought I stood, the Frabjous, with lots of tape, came whiffling to it's final form, and looked awesome as it came.

It looked strange and alien as I put it together (doesn't that first photo look a lot like the Tripods of doom from the Tripods Attack book?).

Next I glued all the vertices to one another using a ton of glue and painted any leftover cardboard spots. Hot glue probably would have worked better.

It's far from perfect (the one on the website was made from laser-cut wood and all the pieces are actually identical), but still looks pretty fun. My brother was so excited and he's hung it on his ceiling.

It looks a bit floppy in this picture... argh!

And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

Allons-y! It's my first Doctor Who jewelry set!

A couple days ago I purchased a metal stamping kit to create jewelry with awesome quotes and sayings. I've always admired this kind of jewelry, but it does take some investment to get the required tools! I finally broke down and now I'm having fun with a rustic metal look that I've never really incorporated into my jewelry pieces before.

It's probably not a surprise to you all that I am a Doctor Who fan. I have my online friend Elenatintil to blame for introducing me to the show, and several irl friends to blame for getting me completely addicted!

For those of you not familiar with Doctor Who... it's complete bonkers to explain. You always wind up sounding like an idiot, but believe me when I say the show's eccentricities make it epic. Basically it is a BBC show about an alien known only as the Doctor who goes around in a 1960's blue Police Box (which is actually a spaceship called the TARDIS) with various companions (typically a modern day London girl), traveling throughout all of time and space and having wacky, deep, usually-quite-intelligent, and hard-to-explain adventures. Oh, and the Doctor is played by several different actors.

This was an image which greatly inspired this jewelry set:

I don't know who made the compilation graphic with the quote on it, but the artwork featured in this picture was made by Alicexz on DeviantArt.

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,

but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint -

it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

I love that "wibbly wobbly timey wimey" quote. It's handy to flourish when your brother is asking you to think about light cones and fourth dimensions. :) "It's all just wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff!"

One of my favorite things about Doctor Who is the pure wonder that the Doctor has bubbled up inside of him and how much beauty he sees in everything from the construction of a man-eating robot to a distant star to a single leaf on planet Earth.

This line, which he says when inviting a friend to join him on his adventures, is short and beautiful:

All of time and space; everywhere and anywhere; every star that ever was... Where do you want to start?

I handstamped the letters onto aluminum, cut out the metal and sanded the edges, punched in holes for the TARDIS blue eyelets, and strung everything onto darkened steel chain sprinkled with blue glass cats-eye beads.

If you are interested, the necklace and two bracelets are for sale as a set on my Shoppe.

Also, I LOVE my camera and its lenses. They were a graduation present and I've been having SO MUCH FUN playing with the settings. :)

Fellow Whovians... what is your favorite Doctor Who quote? And your favorite episode and companion and Doctor? Personally I love Don't Blink, Amy, Martha, and Clara (don't make me pick!) and my bug-eyed Doctor (lol-- it's a joke in my family-- I mean the talented David Tennant of course!).

As a bonus, here is the very first piece that I made with my stamping kit! "Inconceivable!" is, of course, from The Princess Bride, one of the most quotable movies of all time. This one has chainmaille details.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

The Road Goes Ever On and On

I've done some Lord of the Rings artwork lately. Here's a "triptych" (actually, just three paintings in a series, I just want to use "triptych" because "triptych" is a cool word and I like cool words. Triptych is cool. *adjusts bow tie*), a triptych of Tolkien's brilliant "Roads go ever on and on" poem.

Each drawing is based off of different verses or versions found in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I'll send you off to my DeviantArt pages for more info ( "The Road from Bag End", "The Road Back Home",  and "The Road to Mordor").

There is one last version of this poem that I could find, spoken by the elderly Bilbo at the end of all the adventures:

"The Road goes ever on and on

Out from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

Let others follow it who can!

Let them a journey new begin,

But I at last with weary feet

Will turn towards the lighted inn,

My evening-rest and sleep to meet."

I'm dearly tempted to paint that one, too. But then I wouldn't have a triptych.

The scanner wasn't kind to my paintings, so here's some photos for comparison.

While working on this, I listened to my favorite versions of this walking song:

My favorite version. 

I can't sing well, but this is an easy tune and I memorized it so I can sing it while walking the hiking trails... yes, a total geek here!

LotR the Musical version.

Not so fond of this one, but love the musical's version of "The Cat and the Moon."

Tolkien Ensemble version.

Again, not as fond of this particular version, but love the band's other songs-- and their version of "Beren and Luthien" is incredibly haunting.

The movie version (Gandalf humming/singing it)

Which version do you like best? And which verse of the poem is your favorite?