Millionaire Wish List

When I hit Lotto I'm gonna turn my craft/store room into a place where I can go and make jewelry and never ever come out. This would probably please my family except for I don't plan to put a kitchen in there. They'd all starve. Besides some basic work (like air conditioning. That room is stifling), I envision the workstation that dreams are made of.

Firstly, this maple John Frei Double banked workbench would fit perfectly. And, because I don't fuck around, that bench costs over a thousand dollars. For the record, you can get a perfectly serviceable workbench for less than half the price of my dream bench but, hey, I won the lottery!


Thenly, a table top photo kit like this one here. I especially like that black/white box. That's cool. Well, not really cool. Those lights will require that air conditioning I mentioned above.


Afterly, a kiln. I like this one. It's good for both clay metal and glass. Plus, it has a window. You gotta pay extra for the window.


Gripping-handly, there is this here double barreled tumbler kit for shining things up nice and pretty. I'd buy that for sure.


And why-the-hell-notly, a dapping set AND texture hammer with nine interchangable hammer heads.


Plus all the gold and silver wire, clay silver and gold, and experimental glass and resin crap my cash-flushed brain could think of. I'm not even thinking about boxes and beautiful artisan paper.

To take us out, how about this lovely pendant made with metal clay. I would so make my own findings if I ever got my hands on this stuff.

Another List of 5 Things

This time it's 5 Fun Craft Spots.


A Craftster’s saying: No tea cozies without irony. Other Craftster sayings: Measure twice, cut once. Meh, Just start cutting. Knit fast, die warm. At Craftster you can show off your stuff, ask questions about stuff, answer questions about stuff and other crafty-type stuffs.

Pictured, knitted newborn baby caps for when you are nursing in public. O.K., I added the "in public" part.

Pinterest is a fun place to check out other people’s craftiness. Totally hilarious is their gallery of ugly knitted stuff. Be careful, you can waste a lot of time surfing there.





Bad Art, Ugly Crafts a Flikr photostream that had me both horrified and amused. A great combination of feelings if there ever was one.





If the people at Craftster get you down, you can always try Craftzine. I like to browse their ‘Crafter’ section. People who are successful at crafting look about as idiosyncratic as you imagine.





Need Stormtrooper earrings? Look no further than Geek Crafts. They have a craft for every kind of geekatude there is. Plant V Zombies plushies? They got it. A fffffuuuuuuuuu pin? Right here.




You can also, at any time, whenever you like, invite others, even your enemies, to visit my Etsy Shop.

Tutorial Tres: Abuse of Fallopian Tubes

Today's tutorial is how to make the pendant-y part of these earrings. But before we get to that, I'd like to offer some explanations of the whys and wherefores (did you know that wherefore means, basically, why?) of these tutorials.

• My fingernails are paper-thin and weird-shaped and I don't give a darn about them ever. Except for when they appear in a tutorial.
• Same thing goes for my stubby little fingers.
• No, the earwires are never part of the tutorial. Perhaps I'll make a tut just about them.
• Have I previously mentioned I take the tutorial pictures one-handed? How else am I gonna hold the piece and take a picture of it at the same time?
• Going back to the '70s to take LSD is not really recommended, no matter what the tutorial says.

These earrings are not yet available at PinkSlinkie's Shop, but click here anyway and see what is.

That Is Not Creating Jewelry

If people actually read this blog this entry might piss a few of them off. But I’ve been biting my tongue for forever about this and I can no longer hold back. You are not making jewelry. You are stacking ready-made beads on ready-made headpins and affixing a ready-made earwire. That is not creating, that is assembling, which is fine, really. If that’s how you like to pass the time, it’s much better than huffing paint or planking (seriously, WTF is wrong with people?) . But please don’t try to sell it to me for ten bucks when I can buy the kit at Oriental Trading. And they’re a buck apiece.


The only circumstance under which you should try to sell me your stack-on earrings is demonstrated in this picture:

By the way, Fire Mountain Gems has a much cooler kit, also for a buck.


Next up: People who make “wearable art” that is in no way, shape or form “wearable”.



The stuff in my Etsy does have purchased components, but I designed and wire wrapped them all myself.

The Brainstorm That Turned Out To Be A Fart

As I've mentioned, I've seen a lot of bad photos of fellow crafter's wares. Many times, these photos were presented to me in an album. Because my fellow crafters may not be good photographers but they are smart enough to have a handy-dandy catalog they can whip out at the slightest provocation. I had no such thing. Even though I can take a decent picture, I was too dumb to realize I should have my own damned catalog.

Then, one day last week, an epiphany: I, too, should have a catalog. Only it wouldn't be bad pictures in a photo album. No-- it would be nice pictures in a handmade scrapbook! Pure genius! So I set upon this task and after two days of laying out page designs, cutting paper, lettering and embellishing I had 7 pages of a pretty cute scrapbook. That's right. Two days of work and I wasn't even half-way done. Plus a lot of resources went into those pages with no way of reproducing them easily and cheaply. Waitaminit! I got another idea! I could cut down on some of the cost by lettering the pages on the pictures in the computer.

Two seconds of writing on the picture in my computer's photo application and I realized how much time I had wasted. Sure, I can't get the layered scrapbook look but, this is what I ended up with using only the photo application that came with my computer:

Not too bad, no? Easily reproducible and made in ten minutes. If I can think of a way to present them that does not include taking them to a printer or just stuffing them in a photo album, I'm golden.

P.S. Do you like those earrings? You can buy them at PinkSlinkie's Etsy Shop

Something To Shoot For

Late last night, instead of making jewelry, I was watching House Hunters International. Featured were a couple from Denver with 7 children looking for a house in the south of France. Normandy, to be exact. The ended up not buying anything but renting an artist's 7 bedroom countryside manor. Why am I mentioning these two? Because his job was an "internet teacher" and hers was "fashion blogger".

"It's good that we have careers where the hours and the location can be flexible," says the wife.

Because I'm totally sure that teaching on the internet and blogging makes them enough to spend a half a million on a house in Paris while clothing, feeding and buying enough medication to prevent themselves from killing 7 children under the age of 10.

That's it. This blog is getting ads.

You're A Tool

Yes you are, needle-nosed pliers. You and a pen were all the tools I need to make a pair of earrings like these:

But just because you, Needle-nose, was all I need doesn't mean you were all I used. Because that would make things a bit more difficult than they need to be.

10 years ago I mentioned to my son that I'd really like to make jewelry. He, being raised by the best mom ever, got me the best Christmas gifts ever-- a large gift box of beads and beading string, a small spool of 24 gauge brass wire and This book. Before New Years, I got myself a pair of needle-nosed pliers and flush cutters.

That was the start of a long and expensive love affair with making jewelry. I soon bought this very same set of pliers and case, only I got it on eBay for 20 bucks. And I thought that paying 20 bucks was stretching my hobby spending to the limit.

For a long time I was happy with just some wire and what I thought was a cheap set of pliers. But it became apparent to me that my jewelry could be used as instruments of torture. If you wore them, they pinched and poked. I splurged for a set of files and a cup bur.

There was one last set of tools that I really, really wanted, an anvil and hammer set. I promised hubby all sorts of deviant behavior if he got me these things. He bought me these hammers and the world smallest, cutest anvil. I don't know how much deviance he thought he was going to get for 20 bucks. The head fell off of one of the hammers the first time I tried to use it. Still, they're serviceable and better than nothing.

I dream still of saws, a tumbler, a dapping set, a chasing hammer, a soldering torch. . .