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Bird Brains

October 1, 2009 - by bolimasa

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed or have it sent to you by email!. Don't miss a thing!

For some odd reason, probably my biology background, I have a life full of bird people. I have always enjoyed birds and bird watching myself, and am not unusual among my friends. I have several city friends with backyard chickens, another with ducks, and friends with parrots. Bird watching out the windows at work is common thing, everyone knows where the kestrals nest and we’re always on the lookout for the Coopers Hawk that roosts in a nearby tree. So birds and bird people are near and dear to my heart.

birds

My good friend April’s teenage daughter is very into birds, and many years ago they started volunteering at a bird rehabilitaion center where they care for injured birds, from tiny motherless hummingbird babies, to injured golden eagles.

Like most animal rescues, they are always underfunded and in need of donations. In the past I’ve have let April and Haley raid my wonky bowl for beads, which they wired onto cool bookmarks to sell as a fund raiser. Maybe I shouldn’t say wonky bowl, as I never let her take anything very wonky, and instead of just giving her my extra beads I kind of got in the habit of extra beads for them to use.

Because they are bird rehab, I’ve always liked the idea of making some bird themed beads for them to use. Once again this sends me in to the world of making spulptural beads, something I don’t do often or consider myself good at, so it poses a bit of a challenge for me. These are some of the bird beads I’ve come up with thus far. as I don’t feel I have the skills to anything terribly realistic, I decided I try for a bright and cheerfull look.

This has been a significant year for the bird rehab. They were forced to sever ties with their parent facility, and have started a new independent non profit organization; The Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Northern Utah. They’ve been really busy moving to a new facility, and getting their nonprofit status approved, while all the time caring for orphaned and injured birds, ranging from tiny baby hummingbirds to magestic golden eagles. If you are bird or wildlife lover you might enjoy checking out their webpage!

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!

More for Beads of Courage

August 15, 2009 - by bolimasa

butterfly beads of courageA while back I wrote about making beads for a cause; the Beads of Courage Program, which provides very sick children with beads for the various steps they encounter along their treatment journey. The program often uses special beads for special reasons and occasionally you will see a request on a lampwork forum for special bead for a special child. Recently a call went out for a kidney bead, for a child that received both a heart and a kidney transplant. Apparently this poor child hit the 1000 bead mark on it’s treatment necklace. I’m not a sculptural bead maker at all, so I didn’t attempt the kidney bead, but I have been practicing making another special bead, the butterfly.

The butterfly bead is a sad bead to try to make, as they are the beads that are given to parents after a child passes away. They are also difficult for me to make, as I am not a sculptural bead maker. I’ve played around with making them for a while, and have rarely been happy with my results. I usually build a body on the mandrel then add large raised dots along the sides, which I then flatten with my mashers into wings. The problem being is that butterflies have too many wings! I can flatten one wing, but often times while I flatten the second the first cools too much and then *tink* a crack develops. The fact that a simple butterly bead is difficult for me gives me great respect for the sculptural lampworkers.

Finding a nice wing design was also a challenge for me. I tried some dot designs, but had trouble getting the pattern symetrical enough to suit me. I tried plain transparents, but they seemed a little boring to me. I then started making my raised dots with twisty canes, and flattening the wing made a nice whispy look that I thought made an interesting abstract wing.

These are the first butterflies that I’m reasonably happy with. I think my body shape needs some work, I’d like them to look more elegant and little less chunky, but I’m happy enough with these to send then to off to beads of courage.

The weird picture below? So what do you do when crack a wing? Make a practice piece! After ruining the perfectly good butterfly I kept playing by adding eyes and antennae and wings upon wings. All for the sake of practice and finding a design I like.

linda carol morrison experiment bead

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!

Hot Summer Fun

July 29, 2009 - by bolimasa

In addition to my bead making habit, my creative side likes to wander around to all sorts of crafty things, so you can imagine how thrilled I was a couple of years ago when an artsy friend of mine called and offered me the semi-permanent loan of a ceramic kiln she acquired. In my mind I have all sorts of plans to play with clay, but never seem to quite find the time.

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Summer rolled around, and while that doesn’t help me much in the free time department since I work full time, it has for my high school age daughter and all her friends. Knowing I have this great big kiln taking up space in my laundry room she suggested that we do some ceramic painting, like what they do at those pay by the piece ceramic painting studios.

So being the the total sucker for craft projects like I am, one day after work I headed off to Capital Ceramics to stock up on yet another kind of art supply. Fortunately, she wanted to paint coffee cups, which weren’t very expensive, only a couple dollars a piece, so I bought about half a dozen. But then there was the paint. In case you didn’t know, I think there must me a million different colors of ceramic paints, I had some guidelines from the kids for “must have” colors, but I sure had a hard time deciding what to purchase. There were way, way too many choices. $12 worth of bisqueware and $70 dollars worth of glaze later we were “Good to go” at Linda’s ceramic arts studio, AKA the dining room.

Our first painting night it became apparent I didn’t buy enough mugs. Someone must have put out the word that there was fun at Sarah’s house because a whole slew of kids showed up to paint. The mugs were handed out first come first serve. The next day I had to send Sarah back to the ceramic for more mugs to keep everyone happy.

The kids had a blast painting. For some reason I was surprised that the boys all wanted to paint too, and got a real kick out of watching them carefully and creatively decorate their mugs. Am I sexist? Or just remembering back to the days when “china painting” was a ladies only hobby?

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So now after a few painting and glazing sessions it’s time to run the kiln, which of course I’m just dying to do (insert sarcasm here) now that it’s the hottest time of the year. It will be interesting to see the results. Good or bad I think it’s been a great way to help keep the teenagers busy!

Linda beads and blogs and runs a home art program for “wayward” teens in Salt Lake City, Utah….

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