So I really honestly do know that I am not, nor have I ever likely been, mediocre. But there does seem to be some lingering spider webby bits of a veil that was thrust over me in my early years. I'm scrubbing hard and am tantalizingly close to shredding the last remnants. And while I also know that everything I need is within me, words of encouragement along the way are a nice pat on the back, a pleasant nudge to stay on track.
Today's horoscope:
"More than ever before, you'll feel as though it is time to take matters into your own hands and build your own career future. You are fed up with living on hope and putting off your happiness until tomorrow. Your determination will be so strong that you may even surprise yourself. Tomorrow, you'll refine your approach and make it more concrete. Today is the first day of a new life for you, dear Sagittarius."
And from today's Abraham quote ...
"Everything in its perfect time. Everything is unfolding. And I'm enjoying where I am now, in relationship to where I'm going. Content where I am, and eager for more,"
onward ......
blessings - kvk
28 February 2011
26 February 2011
yahoo buckaroos!
Gotta say, it's been a good long while since I had anything on Etsy. They've been busy over there doing all sorts of fancy updating and adding all kinds of features that I do not understand - all kinds of apps and I don't know what all and bunches of new features and benefits, some of which I quite like. But I have finally listed four new pieces, updated my banner and whatever else I could think of. So, if you feel so inclined, click here or in the sidebar, give it a perusal and see what you think - hey, maybe buy something! That would be lovely!
ttfn
with enormous gratitude and many blessings - kvk
p.s. please send your thoughts, love and prayers to my dear friend Nina and her family.
ttfn
with enormous gratitude and many blessings - kvk
p.s. please send your thoughts, love and prayers to my dear friend Nina and her family.
25 February 2011
sneak peek
While riding my emotional pendulum, I've actually been getting a fair amount of work done. Wholesale orders, special orders, repairs and best of all ... NEW WORK! And the really incredible thing is, I'm actually going to list some pieces on Etsy tomorrow. Kind of a Ripley's Believe It or Not moment.
So I've decided to post a sneak peek of two seriously wonderful new pieces.
You've seen the focal point of this first piece ... I finally figured out what to do with the jeweled pendant I showed you way back in January in this post. I came up with the bail idea and then that assembly's been sitting on my worktable waiting for inspiration. I spent most of yesterday afternoon playing around with all sorts of combinations and then it all finally fell together in splendid fashion.
I love all the details ... the leather strap handcut and glued, silk wraps, the button closure - I forged a pmc pebble flat, then attached a KVK button with a tube rivet, and those jumbo pearls are the most delicious color that picks up all the colors of the tunduru sapphires in the pendant and bail. Actually, I'm going to reshoot this since the gemstone colors don't show up very well, but you get the general idea.
The other necklace in our sneak peek is a humdinger! I finally got back out to the Arboretum last week and pulled off at Bent Creek to gather a few quartz pebbles. I brought them home, chucked them in the tumbler for a couple of days to clean them up, drilled some holes and followed my nose from there on out.
The little jeweled drop is set with some of the new Songea sapphires I found on Ebay. The colors are perfect with the quartz. And then there's the retrofitted links that are just an excellent counterpoint to the rough stones. Everything's strung on my own dark espresso silk cord. Very very yummy!
There'll be more jeweled treasures to come as my mondo cache (1300 carats) of rubies and sapphires finally arrived from Thailand. And good golly do I love this stuff - basically gemstone gravel.
I've got another 500 carats of white sapphires coming and a bid in on 500 carats of peridot. One hopes that will hold me for awhile. I've also got some of the new PMC Pro coming and I'm really excited about seeing what it will do. I'm thinking I'll be back in the ring business pretty soon.
Rightio! So that's it for now. Look for at least four new pieces in my Etsy shop tomorrow afternoon.
ttfn along with happy blessings ('cause Django Rhinehardt's playing on Pandora) - kvk
So I've decided to post a sneak peek of two seriously wonderful new pieces.
You've seen the focal point of this first piece ... I finally figured out what to do with the jeweled pendant I showed you way back in January in this post. I came up with the bail idea and then that assembly's been sitting on my worktable waiting for inspiration. I spent most of yesterday afternoon playing around with all sorts of combinations and then it all finally fell together in splendid fashion.
I love all the details ... the leather strap handcut and glued, silk wraps, the button closure - I forged a pmc pebble flat, then attached a KVK button with a tube rivet, and those jumbo pearls are the most delicious color that picks up all the colors of the tunduru sapphires in the pendant and bail. Actually, I'm going to reshoot this since the gemstone colors don't show up very well, but you get the general idea.
The other necklace in our sneak peek is a humdinger! I finally got back out to the Arboretum last week and pulled off at Bent Creek to gather a few quartz pebbles. I brought them home, chucked them in the tumbler for a couple of days to clean them up, drilled some holes and followed my nose from there on out.
The little jeweled drop is set with some of the new Songea sapphires I found on Ebay. The colors are perfect with the quartz. And then there's the retrofitted links that are just an excellent counterpoint to the rough stones. Everything's strung on my own dark espresso silk cord. Very very yummy!
There'll be more jeweled treasures to come as my mondo cache (1300 carats) of rubies and sapphires finally arrived from Thailand. And good golly do I love this stuff - basically gemstone gravel.
I've got another 500 carats of white sapphires coming and a bid in on 500 carats of peridot. One hopes that will hold me for awhile. I've also got some of the new PMC Pro coming and I'm really excited about seeing what it will do. I'm thinking I'll be back in the ring business pretty soon.
Rightio! So that's it for now. Look for at least four new pieces in my Etsy shop tomorrow afternoon.
ttfn along with happy blessings ('cause Django Rhinehardt's playing on Pandora) - kvk
extracting a long buried thorn
A couple of days after my last post, my emotional pendulum took a wild swing to the dark side and it's been an enlightening trip back to this morning's ... well yes, I'm going to say it ... epiphany.
I can't really remember how it started, but here's how I wrote about it in mid-swing ...
I can't really remember how it started, but here's how I wrote about it in mid-swing ...
"Looking back at so many painful memories from adolescence ... feelings of being supremely uncool, a misfit. For so many years, an underlying desire to achieve fame and fortune solely as a 'f-u' to everyone who dissed me in school - seems to be a pretty common motivation. I grew up feeling surrounded by thwarted potential, that mediocrity had been forced onto me along with a suffocating sense of lack, there was never enough.
But in drawing the line in the sand and resolving to create a new life paradigm, that old thorn began to irritate, age old pain flaring up. The pain has brought the thorn to the surface. While still sore and slightly inflamed, the tip is now exposed, primed for extraction. It is right and it is time for all those painful memories to lose their edge. Time for the inflammation to be lanced, the wound flayed open to be bathed in healing light and love."
The need for forgiveness has been the underlying theme. Over the last couple of weeks I've felt the tension easing, those ancient wounds starting to heal. But it's felt like there was still a missing piece. Then during this morning's meditation, it hit me square in the heart ... it's all well and good to forgive all those that had 'done me wrong', but bottom line, the one person that really needed forgiving was myself. When that thought came to me, the tears started pouring and my mind swirled with a long stream of awful and not so awful things that emerged as a long list of regrets. It does no good to forgive someone else if I haven't forgiven myself.
So to make it official, I hereby extract that dreadful and ever so long buried thorn and shout out to the world ...
I FORGIVE MYSELF!
I am a dynamic light filled force, heaven bent on sharing the love and light
that radiates from my heart like a supernova.
The tears are still flowing, but I am filled with so much joy and with so much gratitude .....
blessings - kvk
p.s. if this resonates ... "TRUE FORGIVENESS is the master release process, a tool that opens the energy field of the 'body' and liberates destructive energies from within. Once you actually understand Forgiveness, you will never forgive anyone again. Forgiveness is not letting another off the hook for their offenses. The root meaning of Forgiveness in Aramaic is 'to cancel, untie or let loose.' It is a tool for changing a reality in the mind." ... you might enjoy visiting this website.
p.s. if this resonates ... "TRUE FORGIVENESS is the master release process, a tool that opens the energy field of the 'body' and liberates destructive energies from within. Once you actually understand Forgiveness, you will never forgive anyone again. Forgiveness is not letting another off the hook for their offenses. The root meaning of Forgiveness in Aramaic is 'to cancel, untie or let loose.' It is a tool for changing a reality in the mind." ... you might enjoy visiting this website.
06 February 2011
so much
So very much to be thankful for, to share, to reflect on, to do.
Life's been something of a whirlwind since my last visit. The greatest blessing right now - I've been able to maintain a new-found sense of resolve, the line has been drawn in the sand, the time is now, no longer when.
Inspiration has been coming from so many angles. There have been two really exceptional audio downloads from WhiteHotTruth. One a 20 minute conversation with Hiro Boga, I am now a big fan. And then an equally excellent mass phone call FireStarter session with Jonathan Fields and 2 brave volunteers. So much food for thought and good content. I've been 'stumbling' onto some great magazine and newspaper articles. Today's NY Times had two little jewels in the Style section. Here's a link to one of them. And a trip to Barnes & Noble resulted in a three gems, an Architectural Digest snippet on Donna Karan's new tabletop line, the Artful Blogger for some research I'm doing on an undisclosed future project (titter, titter - have to wait and see about that one) and finally, a lovely issue of American Craft.
We've had some glorious sunny days and Zoe's doing really well, as evidenced here ...
I've had an opportunity to revisit some old friends, jewelry component friends that is.
A surprise order for jangly bones gave me the opportunity to do some updating with new components. Must say, I still really love these components ...
And I've also revisited my Woodland series from two years ago. The first incarnation came into being soon after we moved to Asheville, inspired by these old mountains, the winter landscape and visions of woodland tinker folk and the land of faerie. I had made a lot of the components and sold several of the series, but ended up collecting all the unsold pieces and dismantling them, regularly gazing at the bits and pieces in my storage bins wondering how they would get reincarnated.
Then last week, I had one of those late night epiphanies. Languishing on my worktable was a bowl full of large would-be sterling chain links. A fair amount of silver was there and I knew I'd use them up one day and that day turned out to be January 27th. The idea - double up the long links to join the metal clay rings.
These were good ...
But I think these are so much more better ...
Cleaner lines, earthy but still contemporary and interesting. Next, I still liked the idea of the leather, but again wanted a cleaner silhouette. I sat at my worktable all last Sunday afternoon, cutting leather strips, gluing them together, figuring out the whole glue thing was in there as well, choosing the silk to wrap and then hours sitting there playing around with endless combinations for how the pieces would close. I needed a clasp that was low-tech, direct yet interesting, easy to operate and appropriate to the piece. After all those hours of diddling around with scraps of leather and silk, I am enormously pleased to share the delicious fruit of my labors. Here's the first version, about 19" long ...
And the clasp on the second one has a bit more of a flourish and the piece is 21" so that it can be worn as a bracelet, which looks amazing. Here's a close-up of the clasp ...
And a little different angle of the finished piece ...
It's hard to complain about a rotten night's sleep when this is the result.
And then there's so much to do!
I'm still itching to get back to my cast glass experiments, but they'll be on the back burner a bit longer. I'm pleased as punch to say that, after a seven year absence, Gallery of the Mountains at the Grove Park Inn is bringing my jewelry back in - the order is in progress on my worktable right now and I'll be heading back to it shortly. I've also figured out how I want to use the channel set gemstone pendant, the corkclay base is drying as we speak and the new metal clay bail design will get fired along with the GOM components. And as if I don't have enough to think about, I'm starting to look into creating my own line of perfume - how's that for random? I've got a friend from Port Townsend that used to make the most exquisite blends and my last little vial is running low and she's out of the perfume business. So's I emailed her yesterday and she emailed back and I've got a starting place. This will be a pretty long wait and see, but I think it's got potential. Then there's that aforementioned undisclosed project, which is going to remain undisclosed, that is in the infant stages of R&D.
Oh my yes, so much ... so very much. Blessings are raining down upon me and I'm about to bust. Ain't it grand?
sweet blessings to all - kvk
Life's been something of a whirlwind since my last visit. The greatest blessing right now - I've been able to maintain a new-found sense of resolve, the line has been drawn in the sand, the time is now, no longer when.
Inspiration has been coming from so many angles. There have been two really exceptional audio downloads from WhiteHotTruth. One a 20 minute conversation with Hiro Boga, I am now a big fan. And then an equally excellent mass phone call FireStarter session with Jonathan Fields and 2 brave volunteers. So much food for thought and good content. I've been 'stumbling' onto some great magazine and newspaper articles. Today's NY Times had two little jewels in the Style section. Here's a link to one of them. And a trip to Barnes & Noble resulted in a three gems, an Architectural Digest snippet on Donna Karan's new tabletop line, the Artful Blogger for some research I'm doing on an undisclosed future project (titter, titter - have to wait and see about that one) and finally, a lovely issue of American Craft.
We've had some glorious sunny days and Zoe's doing really well, as evidenced here ...
I've had an opportunity to revisit some old friends, jewelry component friends that is.
A surprise order for jangly bones gave me the opportunity to do some updating with new components. Must say, I still really love these components ...
And I've also revisited my Woodland series from two years ago. The first incarnation came into being soon after we moved to Asheville, inspired by these old mountains, the winter landscape and visions of woodland tinker folk and the land of faerie. I had made a lot of the components and sold several of the series, but ended up collecting all the unsold pieces and dismantling them, regularly gazing at the bits and pieces in my storage bins wondering how they would get reincarnated.
Then last week, I had one of those late night epiphanies. Languishing on my worktable was a bowl full of large would-be sterling chain links. A fair amount of silver was there and I knew I'd use them up one day and that day turned out to be January 27th. The idea - double up the long links to join the metal clay rings.
These were good ...
But I think these are so much more better ...
Cleaner lines, earthy but still contemporary and interesting. Next, I still liked the idea of the leather, but again wanted a cleaner silhouette. I sat at my worktable all last Sunday afternoon, cutting leather strips, gluing them together, figuring out the whole glue thing was in there as well, choosing the silk to wrap and then hours sitting there playing around with endless combinations for how the pieces would close. I needed a clasp that was low-tech, direct yet interesting, easy to operate and appropriate to the piece. After all those hours of diddling around with scraps of leather and silk, I am enormously pleased to share the delicious fruit of my labors. Here's the first version, about 19" long ...
And the clasp on the second one has a bit more of a flourish and the piece is 21" so that it can be worn as a bracelet, which looks amazing. Here's a close-up of the clasp ...
And a little different angle of the finished piece ...
It's hard to complain about a rotten night's sleep when this is the result.
And then there's so much to do!
I'm still itching to get back to my cast glass experiments, but they'll be on the back burner a bit longer. I'm pleased as punch to say that, after a seven year absence, Gallery of the Mountains at the Grove Park Inn is bringing my jewelry back in - the order is in progress on my worktable right now and I'll be heading back to it shortly. I've also figured out how I want to use the channel set gemstone pendant, the corkclay base is drying as we speak and the new metal clay bail design will get fired along with the GOM components. And as if I don't have enough to think about, I'm starting to look into creating my own line of perfume - how's that for random? I've got a friend from Port Townsend that used to make the most exquisite blends and my last little vial is running low and she's out of the perfume business. So's I emailed her yesterday and she emailed back and I've got a starting place. This will be a pretty long wait and see, but I think it's got potential. Then there's that aforementioned undisclosed project, which is going to remain undisclosed, that is in the infant stages of R&D.
Oh my yes, so much ... so very much. Blessings are raining down upon me and I'm about to bust. Ain't it grand?
sweet blessings to all - kvk
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