Parrsboro 2011

The Herkimer Diamond. That's what I discovered on this year's trip to the Nova Scotia Gem and Mineral show at Parrsboro. Good thing I didn't skip the show this year :D. I love these beautiful pieces of clear quartz. There was a couple from Ontario selling them ; I bought 3 B grade crystals and upon arrival home, set out to wrap my favorite in sterling silver. Didn't measure anything, so I really don't know how much wire I used, although I can guesstimate about 10-12 inches of 20ga, and 1 1/2 - 2 ft of 24ga. You'll notice there are no prongs or wraps across the frame holding the stone, it's held in place pretty much just from the tension of the frame, although some of the edges are wedged in the groove created by wrapped wires. This was my first time doing the woven bale, and I'm not terribly thrilled with how I anchored it at the back. I had these tails to deal with, so I tried to make them into decorative bits. They were okay, but not great. Turns out I should have left them that way. Instead I tried to improve the curve, and a wire broke just above one of the twists that holds the frame together. The frame itself still is taught, but the bale is now a bit unstable :(. Not sure what I'm going to do about that yet. Good thing this one was for myself. The pendant is about an inch and a quarter long.

Other bits picked up at the show include a rectangular, faceted bit of rutilated quartz, a rounded-corner cube of pyrite (also just for me), a strand of pyrite beads and a strand of bronzite beads. Guess I'm into the "-ites" this year.

note: you can find the couple selling the Herkimer Diamonds at www.herkimerdiamonds.ca

Design Changes

So, if you've been to my blog before, you may have noticed I changed the design. I had to change templates anyway, in order to take advantage of the horizontal page link bar, so I went ahead and changed my banner/header, which I'd been thinking of doing. It's a bit more vivid, and significantly less mellow than it was before, but hey, I guess I was just in the mood to "pop". I usually don't discuss my other hobbies here, but I'm about to make an exception... just 'cause :-)

So one of my other hobbies is photography. It is relevant to this blog because I use my digital photos, although sometimes with heavy post processing, to make the artwork for my blog. In this particular case, my new banner is a crop of a macro photo I took when I first bought my digital camera, a Pentax Optio MX4 (which I still use btw: 4mp and 10x optical zoom, for those who care). The subject was a kerchief that was layed directly on the lens to test the macro feature; turns out it really can focus at Zero cm from the lens, which is pretty uncommon, I think even now. The crop and soft focus was done in picasa, then the semi-transparent background for the text, plus the text itself, was added using PhotoStudio 5.5, which came with my old printer, if I remember correctly.

I do feel slightly guilty about the giant photo background, probably because it's only a few months ago since I got off the dial-up myself, but I seriously doubt there are too many folks reading this at all, let alone being on dial-up still, so I'm sticking with it like this for awhile.