A little scrimshaw....

I've still been playing with some vintage finds in my studio. This first piece is one I'm very excited about! This is a piece of ivory colored bone...it is a flat necklace bead in a unique shape, and I have several of them off of a vintage necklace. I decided to try a little scrimshaw work (something I've always wanted to do!). Using a needle, and by making several stippling marks with the needle, I fashioned a falling heart design on the material. Then I filled in this impressions with both red and black paint. This took several times....several dots, several applications of paint...to get the design to take shape. This is my result:


It framed up nicely with the silver solder. I'm very excited about this, because I've been wanting to somehow integrate my own art onto the pieces of jewelry I'm making with the sculpted solder frames. Of course, most scrimshaw is usually done on ivory - and these pieces may be ivory, but I'm not sure, so I'm just calling them bone. I've also ordered some tagua nut slices to try this technique on. They are larger than these, which are long and skinny, and have a very small workspace. I can't wait until they get here! In the meantime, I'll keep working with these bone pieces and see what other designs I can create, based on their odd shape.

I also finished some other pendants this weekend using neat vintage things I found in my studio.


The pendant shown above has a large, unpolished turquoise nugget stone. I added a bone bead at the bottom, which has chips of turquoise and coral embedded in the bone. Then I accented that with red jade beads. It's a very chunky, natural looking piece of jewelry.


Next is a red floral cinnabar bead. I added a freshwater pearl at the bottom to make it a bit more flirty. :)


Here's something for the dragon lovers....a green cinnabar carved bead with a dragon motif. I've been hanging onto this bead for over 10 years!

And finally, a carved bone face bead. The design is rather primitive and very cool looking. :)