The Madness Continues

I've just finished two more completely experimental pieces for Izile's Oddities on etsy. I guess I'm kind of looking at these as intellectual place holders or bookmarks. I've been having so many ideas, but I can't do them all because most of them have step one as, "go buy _____ materials." And yeah, that's not happening any time soon. My shop sales are all going to keeping me fed and my bills paid at the moment. So nothing left to put back into the business. However, sometimes I'm able to make something similar to what I have in mind, at least enough to test out the theories of application.

This is where my new Constellation Pendants come in. I've had this idea for a month or so, but I was held up by my inability to afford PMC (sterling silver precious metal clay). So, until I can afford the "real thing," I've made a trial prototype out of silver-colored polymer clay. This means it can't be as delicate as I would like the real sterling silver product to be, but it seems that the idea has merit! I tried two variations: 1) carving the constellation into the clay and marking the stars with salvaged antique rhinestones or 2) marking the path between stars with bar-shaped salvaged rhinestones. I believe style 1 (Cassiopeia) is the more successful, though 2 (Cygnus) is interesting, I like the bar shaped rhinestones less.

Per usual, I put my experimental prototypes up on my etsy store under "Izile's Experiments" at pretty much cost price only.

I have plans of figuring out how to do Pegasus and Draco in particular. But both require over 20 stars to complete them, and so the pendants would need to be much larger. (Cassiopeia is 1.75 x .75 inches and Cygnus is essentially a 1 inch round.)

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And you know who out there in Etsy-land is totally sympatico with what's going on in my head right now? Two Beans: unique gifts for the home. I love unique! And amongst all the variations of home decorating items (bonus points and cheers to them for working the word "Amalgamation" into a listing title!) is the Andromeda Plate! 6.5 inch diameter soapstone dish engraved and gilded with the constellation Andromeda in the bottom! It's fabulous, and there's also a Hydrus plate that could go along with it, and at 8.75 inch diameter, it would work as a great complimentary set!