The Marriage of Decoupage and Jewelry~ Ephemearrings

Well, it had to happen. The mixing of decoupage and my jewelry design. I'm sure it's been done a million different ways by other folks but this is what I was playing around with the other day. I've been so delighted with my disc cutter and my dapper... feeling kind of dapper about it.
These are the first tries and some good lessons were learned in the process.

I learned about letting the sealer dry before varnishing the other side on this.

I really didn't want that kind of shabby look.

Also my discs are unevenly cut. 

This makes them prototypical and probably a present for some

slightly un-picky friend type person

t'other side, see they're reversible!

Interior cutout from decoupaged tin disc

Spell check never likes this word

How about decoupage-ed?

Side B

Hey you woodchucks!

Side B of woodchucks

 taken from vintage children's book

Centers of course!

Now you're getting it!

 Another trial and error and somewhat of a fix.

Trying to see what my Metal Finishes magic stuff I bought last year would do.

Patina spray makes a greyish finish on the galvanized tin.

Then I painted the copper paint and sprayed it again.

I was pretty happy with it until I though I could seal it with some

varnish which gave it a forever sticky finish so I sanded most of it off.

Next time I'll leave it as is without the varnish.

Some more of my lampwork head pins  fastened to brass domes

Dangles anyone?

More Numinista head pins.

Did I tell you I'm selling head pins now in my Etsy Shop

more coming, I'll give first peek here and you guys can grab them hot off the press.

OK,  so I do have to let them cool....

I have more made up but I've run out of my preferred Vintaj or Trinity earwires

that I get from Cindy's Wicked Good Beadz

I've got a stash back in Alaska so since I'm taking them with me, they're gonna have to wait.

Raining & Complaining

       It may be raining nearly every day here but at least it's not cold and dark.

One of my very favorite activities of sub-arctic winter ~ Snowshoeing!

Something I don't get to do much anymore since we started escaping to Arizona for the winters.

Frosty Girl

Summer blueberry picking.

I don't think we've had more than two days of blue sky since May here. The temps have been hovering between 50F and 60 F  (10C-15C) with clouds, rain or wind for most of June and July now.  I have managed to get in a few good spells of blueberry picking in between clouds and at least it's light out all night albeit rainy.

It does make for some good studio time though and I've been attacking the 100 or so archaeology artifact boxes that I was given that were going to be thrown away by the university museum and I'm doing some decoupage of ephemera and images on them.

I also have a couple of metal tables that I'd picked up at a garage sale that are ripe for decoupage as well. The philatelic magazines that my husband gets are full of stamp and antique mail images that I'm finding to be fun to decoupage.

UFO's - Un Finished Objects

This is a reliquary of objects found on the nearby migrant trails close to my house. We're quite close to the Mexican border.

I think I'm going to capture this colibri in a frame

I got this bread box at the thrift store and I'm decoupaging images from an old social studies and a physics book. Needs a special knob I think.

I had been reading Altered Bits blog about her huge list of unfinished projects and had to analyze my own pile of unfinished projects.

As a lampworker/beadmaker I'm accustomed to quite short projects of under 30 minutes each although I usually dedicate an afternoon to the torch up to four hour stretches, max. I find I need to take a 10 to 30 minute break every hour as it is quite a focused sort of craft when actually torching. These breaks are the perfect time to have some ice tea on the patio or check in on my internet goings on.

Lately though it seems since my retirement and my snowbird seasons in Arizona I am incredibly drawn to the altered art and collage and working with found objects since there's such a wealth of resources for cool stuff either in thrift stores or on the ground as I rummage about. It was harder in Alaska as far as the easy fabulous finds go. People tend to hang on to their stuff and there just isn't the population base that you have in the States.

Since my retirement I have come to look upon my bead and jewelry designing business as my "real job" and my hobby is the assemblage/collecting/ altered art. In reality they are all melding together in a wonderful flow of expression for me.

The collage and decoupage projects are the ones that are tending to be in a state of evolving.....OK, OK, they're just not finished! Some I started last winter when we were here.

We were so inundated with visitors from the northland that wanted to taste our Arizona sunshine that my creativity took a back seat to entertaining. Oh, and then the little matter of my folks coming to visit and my father's heart attack and ensuing quadruple bypass on the last day of their visit. Actually one of the reasons I took an early retirement was to have more flexibility in caring for my aging parents. How convenient of them to have the crisis at my warm sunny Arizona abode rather than cold and wintry New England.

My friend PJ that's a member of the Bisbee Fiber Arts Guild says that they call the unfinished projects UFO's for Un-Finished-Objects.

Here are a few of my own UFO's-

From My Brother's Travel Collection

Front Side

Back side


My artistic brother recently gifted me with a pile of his own ephemera dating back to the early 70's from his extensive travels. I decided that the fitting first project would be to gift it back to him in the form of a collaged/decoupaged tin. Tickets and stubs, decorative cigarette packages and a couple of his passport photos make up the front and a baggage claim ticket, airline ticket and security fee slip make up the back.