After two days of solid work, I have completed my oeuvre.  Sadly, I have no sunlight to photograph it in at the moment, so you’ll have to settle for two not-too-good photos of it.  The first shows the glow of the carnelian cabochon, but is overexposed due to the flash; the second doesn’t show the carnelian well, but does show off the brass and copper nicely.  Sorry if the photo looks a little weird; I did some work in Photoshop to restore the warmth of the brass/copper since the light I had for photographing was very blue in cast, but I’m not a Photoshop expert so may have gotten it wrong.  It looks OK on my monitor, not sure about yours.

At any rate, here are the pix:

I’m quite parentally proud of this brooch/shawl pin; the carnelian is beautiful and the copper, brass, and silver bezel setting show it off nicely.  And it’s mine, mine, all mine!

B. made a beautiful pendant of which he is equally (and justly) proud – I’ll see if I can get pix for you later.

The Crucible is way cool.  B. and I are agreed that we want to take more classes there.

B. and I spent yesterday in the jewelrymaking intensive, where I’ve been having a great deal of fun making a shawl pin out of a large (1.5″) carnelian cabochon.  I’m setting it in a silver bezel (silver bezel wire is all they’ve got), on an eight armed “sun” made out of brass and copper.  Should make a very nice shawl pin.

Thus far, we’ve learned several ways to rivet pieces together, and how to bezel set a stone.  I ran home during the lunch break to get my collection of bits and pieces – if the carnelian setting goes well, I should have enough time to do a second project.  I think I may do a silver ring with a bezel-set oval of blue glass – I don’t know how to describe the glass oval, as it’s much more beautiful than that.  There are patterns in the glass that are reminiscent of complex bubbles (except there aren’t bubbles) – I’ll post a photo if I manage to make the ring.

We also learned how to texture metal using the roller mill.  I’m bringing a bunch of my handwoven samples in today and am going to texture the metals for the shawl pin using handwoven fabric!  Kind of neat for a shawl pin that’s going with handwoven shawls.

Other than that, no particular news – I’m hoping to finish up the incandescent orange shawl today (about 24″ left to go, should take about two hours), and, of course, the two jewelry pieces.  I’ve also been making more and more patterns for bookmarks – every time I think I’ve exhausted the possibilities with this one 100-thread threading, I think of more twists and turns I can do!  Truly, the possibilities are endless.

Oh, and on the job front: it turns out the company can’t afford to hire me after all, but (if we can sort out the details) I may do some contracting for them.  That would be fun – I really like the people and they really like me, so it’ll be a pleasant month or two before I land a job elsewhere.  Both sides are thinking it over right now, I’ll know more on Monday.