Wedding Ring

My wedding ring is finished! I'm very excited about how it turned out. Wren, the artist-owner of Goldworks in Chapel Hill hand-crafted my ring based on some shaky sketches and a description of my vision. She called me to say she'd worked on an example--she wasn't sure it was exactly what I wanted but she was pleased with the piece. So I went in for a look. I fell in love with it instantly and wouldn't you know it, she made it in my size. It fit perfectly and Wren didn't even know what my ring size was. I picked out this cute elephant ring box. The poor little guy has lost an eye but he's still got the goods.



The ring is made of all recycled metals. Palladium white gold intertwined with rose gold. The effect is meant to be an abstract twist of metal vines intertwined with some textured leaves.
Nick loves it because the two different metals represent the two of us. He's such a romantic.


This last image is of my tree-bark engagement ring made by Etsy artist Beth of bcyjewelry and my wedding ring together. I wasn't planning on wearing both the rings when I got married, but after seeing them together I'm reconsidering. Thank you to both fabulous artists for creating such beautiful, special pieces for me.

Easter Eggs

In honor of the Spring Equinox my future sister-in-law and I marbled some Easter Eggs. The weather was a gorgeous 80 degrees, probably the prettiest day of the year so far. I'll let the pictures tell the story. If you have no idea what I'm referring to when I say "marbeling" check out this post first: http://maryhining.blogspot.com/2009/11/hydro-printing-at-penland.html

Happy Spring everyone!

I started by boiling a few dozen eggs.


I created a large bucket of Methyl Cellulose for my
"slime bath" which is the medium the paint is dropped onto.
It looks and feels just like slime.



The eggs need to be coated in alum, which is what allows
for the paint to bond to the surface of the egg.


Just a quick 5-second dip per egg does the trick.


The fun part is using the eye dropper to add your colors to
the slim bath. I'm a little short on professional tools so I used
a fork and a chopstick to manipulate the paint into various designs.

I tried two approaches to coating the eggs with paint. The first was simply dropping the
eggs into the bowl. But It wasn't working very well and ended up just making a big mess.
So I started rolling the eggs on the surface of the slim.

I think the eggs turned out fabulous. I'm not going to risk
eating them as they are coated in paint and alum, but they
certainly are lovely to look at.