I make wearable things and she makes 2-D things, large and small. When we're lucky, her traveling work comes home to roost and fills our gallery walls with dashes of color, line and form. Her subject matter is often personal cartography: mapping. Her quilt-maps are of places, both real and imagined.
She makes small works, too. And recently, a certain shape and color in one of her small works caught my eye. All sorts of fireworks went off in my brain, and I began to see renditions of it in metal and stone.
It began with a drawing, which I turned into a pattern and traced onto a sheet of red jeweler's brass. Then, with my jeweler's saw, I cut the shape out and smoothed its edges.
To bring Valerie's olive green into my piece, I chose this olive green Lizard Jasper, a trapezoid cabochon, and turned it on its head. I love its little lizard eye.
I set the stone into fine silver bezel after soldering bits of recycled sterling and bronze to the surface of the piece. I hand-stamped myriad patterns and designs into the metal, reminiscent of the spatters in Valerie's fabric.
The abstract pendant is linked into an antiqued copper chain and closes with an antiqued copper toggle clasp.
It's about 1.5" wide and about 2.75" tall. With its chain, it's about 25" around.
The pendant is available in my Etsy shop:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/123010486/abstract-pendant-in-brass-with-lizard
Valerie's work can be seen by visiting her Facebook fan page and exploring her various links to websites, etc. https://www.facebook.com/CartographicArtQuilts
