I am Featured Designer

I have been chosen Featured Designer of the Week over at Art Bead Scene Blog.

Thank you so much! It makes me so happy you know.

This is what ABS Editor Rebecca Anderson had to say about my piece:

"I absolutely adore these earrings! I love the vibrant yet rustic shades that Malin has picked out from this month's beautiful challenge piece, I love the painterly texture that the verdigris patina gives MissFickleMedia's swirls, I love their simple elegance and the embellished earwires.....and last (but certainly not least) I love how Malin has set them for this photograph. The thin branch is the perfect place to display these earrings. These are eminently wearable earrings! Fantastic work Malin."

I am honoured!

Link to my own original blog post about my contributions.

All my best,
Malin

I am featured on Art Bead Scene Blog: June Monthly Challenge Blog Tour

I can not enough underscore the importance of Art Bead Scene for my creative journey in jewelry making. So when I am featured on their blog I am always exceptionally proud and happy. And now it has happened again! Yihaaaaaa!

Go and check Erin's post and wrap up list that will take you on a very inspiring blog tour indeed, with a good bunch of participants for the challenge for June. I am honored to be one of them.

Here's the link to the blog tour post on Art Bead Scene.

Here's the link to my own post for my contribution.

All my best!

ABS June Challenge Necklace - Somewhere Down The Crazy River

My contribution for the June Challenge at Art Bead Scene became a necklace. It has undergone a few transformations on it's journey to the final piece. Started off as a bracelet with Gaea's green button as the clasp and center piece. 7 strands of waxed linen cord strung with Delica beads size 11/0. But I couldn't make the clasp solution look good. Gave up after trying about 10 different ways. Moody about it of course. I really like all those strands.
One of the first things I picked out from my stash when starting on the challenge piece was the multi-holed pendant from RoundRabbit. Hey, look at that. I can combine them! I like!!!!

Also tried quite a few different solutions for the chain/ribbon part. Ended up simplifying it more and more. Now it's only a chain and a leather ribbon. And I kept shortening it too. I generally don't make necklaces as short as this one. But with a pendant like this you want it to sit higher. And you want the fringy bit to hang by the clevage.
Here's another pathetic try by me to take a photograph with myself as the model. This was the least bad one anyway. I might have a new solution to this "show the piece on" problem. Will see tomorrow how it works. Now I must add a note to this paragraph. I just realized this particular photo wasn't taken by myself at all. My 7 year old daughter took it for me. I guess she didn't keep her hand all that steady either ... Sorry for being unclear.

Below is the art piece by Odilon Redon we are supposed to be inspired by. It's a lovely lovely painting/pastel. And it was very easy to be inspired by it. I do have some more things simmering on my bead table for more contributions. We'll see if I finish any more of them off.Here on flickr you can see some more contributions from other jewelry artists. More will be added through until the end of the month. So keep coming back if you are the curious kind.

All my best!

Malin

ABS May Challenge - Bracelet

My contribution for Art Bead Scene's May challenge is a bracelet. I named it "Hide and Seek", just like the painting by Berthe Morisot. Read about the piece and the challenge here.

I just completely fell for the color scheme of strong green, very light grey and touches of ochre in this painting. Or at least those where the colors that stood out to me as the ones I wanted to work with. A somewhat unusual combo in a jewelry piece maybe. But oh so yummie!

I am very pleased and excited about the solution with the three leather ribbons/bands going in and out of Round Rabbit's beautiful porcelain rings. They are playing hide and seek with each other :-) .

Look, I tried to take a Lorelei Eurto-esque picture of the bracelet on me. I really like her style when she photographs the pieces on herself. No one was there to help me, so I ended up with a bunch of pictures of the wall behind me and a little bit of my nose in one corner. I didn't bother with setting up the camera or programming it for delayed exposure. Simply held it myself with a stretched out arm. This one worked out ok anyway.

The pattern on the porcelain rings works perfectly to capture the romantic atmosphere in the painting, don't you agree.

The green dangle bead is a Swarovski milky green facetted round. The rest is copper components.

If you wanna see all the current contributions for the challenge go here.

And don't miss the blog hop about all the contributions that has been blogged about, starting at Art Bead Scene at the end of the month.

All my best! Have a great weekend. Mine will be very busy :-)

Necklace Tahiti - ABS Challenge March

Art Bead Scene's inspiration piece for the March challenge is a colourful painting by Paul Gaugain, which he painted on Tahiti where he lived for many years. It is the colours that really struck me with this piece. They are so bright and ... well ... yes colourful. Everything in the picture is just bathing in strong sunlight. There is a calm and relaxing atmosphere also which I wanted to capture.

I was looking through my bead stash for suitable pieces and found this beautiful porcelain flower pendant by Tracee Dock of ClassicBeads and ClassicElements. And please look closely at the close-up picture further down at the absolutely gorgeous use of glaze. That is a master at work who has done that. Multi-dimensional perfection. Yes, the pink, the green and the yellow was colours I lusted for. Perfect! And the honeysuckle pink coral rondelle beads I bought almost two years ago, when I had just started to buy bead from Etsy. Listen, I have a secret to reveal. I have a weakness for pink. I have many many many many pink beads. But I do find it is kind of hard to use them though, without creating a too sweet piece. Musn't be too sweet I think.

Ivory seed beads I have had for about 25 years are strung on 2 strands of Superlon cord and in between the coral beads. The beaded toggle ring I made myself a couple of weeks ago whilst learning to do beaded rings. Turned out nice I think with the two colours of the seed beads. What a lucky coincidence it happened to fit so perfectly in this piece. I made a beaded toggle bar also, but I wasn't pleased with how it looked in this piece, so I decided to give it a try to make my first own handmade hammered brass wire toggle bar instead. That and the Superlon cord which I wrapped many laps around at the attachment points adds just an enough bit of a more rustic feeling to the sweet I think.

And here is the beautiful painting by Gaugain.

Go to ArtBeadScene's flickr group page to see more contributions for this challenge.

Taken On A Journey by Mary - ABS Jan Challenge

It seems like we are quite a few who have been super inspired by this months challenge painting on ABS. I had never heard of or seen anything by this artist before. But now I am a big fan. This painting is wonderful. The colours, the way he has applied the paint, the composition, the motif, all of it. I feel I can travel into that landscape. And last Saturday I was sitting working on this necklace for a good hour in my studio. All the time with the paining in front of me.

I took a break and went to flickr's ABS-page to see if anyone had put anything there for the challenge. Mary Harding had. And she wrote about her own personal experiences from that particular place on earth. I don't know what happened, but I just made the most extrodinary journey into that painting together with Mary both of us around 8 or 9 years old. It was totally mind blowing, and I sat there with tears down my cheeks. Very very powerful! I guess her telling related to memories from my own childhood. Read on Mary's blog about her entry.

I was still in this feeling all Sunday and half of today as I've continued working on my necklace. So many dimensions have been added for me. Not only have I really enjoyed working on this challenge, and experienced a new artist, completely fallen in love with a painting. But I have traveled to a place I've never been, become a child again and I made a new friend as that child. We were playing in those ditches although we weren't allowed to (always also was where I wasn't supposed to be, often in connection with water...). The sun was really bright and the colour yellow was dominant, aswell as the brown river water. Then we went paddling on the river with Mary's father. Magic!
I can't name this necklace anything else than "Taken On A Journey By Mary". Thank you so much for this special and unusual experiance. I hope I could visit there with you in real life one day. And I LOVE the necklace you made. It is soooooo beautiful.

Of course Mary's necklace was picked for Designer of the Week. Of Course!!!!

I should say something about my own design I guess. And this is what i wrote on flickr:

I just loooove this month's inspiration painting by Walter Thiebaud. I can look for ages at all the little dots of paint in all different colours. (And I really have). All the structures that are created, the composition, the motif. The colour combinations. It is all so utterly appealing. And I can't get enough.

So for my necklace I wanted to create the yumminess of all these colours. And really I could just pick them right there from his marvelous palette (hence the hours of staring…). Lots and lots and lots of colours, and structures and … No need to hold back at all. Just go for it!

Art beads:

Polymer clay filled toggle clasp by Heather Powers of Humble Beads

White dotty ceramic bead by Lisa Stevens of C-Urchin

Shank button in brown-red and dark blue by Shannon LeVart of MissFickleMedia

Pewter dangle from Objects and Elements (the top part of the pendant)

Some of the other components:

Recycled Sari Silk

An unusual chain I believe is in steel and which has a few small rust marks here and there

Opal of different kinds

Agate

Czech glass beads of many kinds and colours

Seed beads of many kinds and colours

Millifiori squares

Brass

Trade beads

and more

All my best,

Malin