Spring 2012 Giveaway! New Design - Galaxy Ring

Source: Hubblesite.org

Finally! It is here! For those of you that don't follow me on facebook, I've been giving hints all week for a big giveaway that I am announcing today!

The details:

I am giving away one custom ring in my new galaxy ring design. It is 5mm wide with stars and optional diamonds in my new palladium/silver alloy. The sample ring in the photos has one large star and 3 smaller stars and 3 2mm diamonds. Number of stars and diamonds is totally up to the winner (though, no more than 3 diamonds). My plan for making it more "manly" when I do the full set, will be less stars and less diamonds, a little more simple and with just the texture and possibly one star... It also include optional engraving.



The value of this ring is $480.

And as a special surprise, I decided to also do a 2nd prize of a $50 gift certificate towards anything jewelry in either of my shops.

and now the important info!

How to Enter

1. You must follow me on my facebook page or my blog

Your name will be entered in the drawing once for each of the following

*follow on facebook
*follow on blog
*follow on twitter
*repost on facebook
*repost on blog
*repost on twitter
*join my mailing list
*pin one of these ring photo on pinterest

(your name could be entered a total of 8 times)

2. Leave a comment on this blog post letting me know

a. where you follow me, if you reposted or joined my mailing list
(if you are currently on the mailing list, you don't need to sign up again)

b. let me know what nature theme you would like to see in a ring set
OR let me know your current favorite design

Winners will be chosen on April 17th.

*I will be using random.org to choose the winners. Each name will be assigned a number. Let's say Christina enters 7 times, she'll have numbers 1 - 7 assigned to her. The first number chosen will be the winner of the ring, the 2nd number chosen will be the winner of the $50 gift certificate. If I'm not able to contact the winner through a message on facebook or email, I will announce their name here on the blog.

More photos can be seen on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bcyrjewelry/
or on my facebook page.

Thanks for participating! :)

Blog-o-sphere Think Tank - March Topic - a photo / image that inspires you..(or favourite image) and to what?

The March topic for the blog-o-sphere think tank is: a photo / image that inspires you..(or favourite image) and to what?

This was going to be really easy for me b/c recently I was very inspired by an image of a light echo from a star (photo taken by hubble - the site is awesome)

Source: Hubblesite.org

I am so inspired by a lot of photos of stars, nebulae, galaxies, molecular clouds, and distant planets and moons. I'm completely fascinated by the images and the fact that they are captured the way they are! Sometimes the photos evoke more of a feeling, though this one was quite literal in it's translation... and color.

This was the ring I create from the photo inspiration -





Make sure to check out other inspiring images from this month's participants:

Andes cruz: http://www.andescruz.wordpress.com

Thomasin Durgin: http://metalriot.blogspot.com/

pencilfox: www.astorynontheless.blogspot.com

Kathleen Krucoff: http://mysticalmythicalmetalwork.wordpress.com/

Renée Dolling: www.floatinglightsphotography.com/blog

Shannon Koochin: http://thebassplayersdaughter.blogspot.com

EtsyMetal Book Club - The Passage by Justin Cronin

I love to read, though I've never been in a book club until we started the EtsyMetal book club. The idea was to read the book and make a piece inspired by the book. A couple books I've ready and just didn't feel inspired. And I missed a couple of books, as... they didn't sound very interesting. The most recent book sounded great and I found very inspiring.

It was The Passage by Justin Cronin.

I thought it was well written and moved along pretty quickly, especially for a complicated story line/character list.

It is really interesting as an artist to be inspired by written text - and particularly transforming it in to a 3-dimensional, metal piece. There were lots of ideas I had that could have translated well in to drawings or paintings. One in particular jumped out at me in terms of a metal piece. The teeth. This paragraph in particular really stuck with me:

For instance: Subject Zero glowed. In the infrared any heat source would do that. But the image of Subject Zero flared on the screen like a lit match, almost too bright to look at. Even his crap glowed. His hairless body, smooth and shiny as glass, looked coiled - that was the word Grey thought of, like the skin was stretched over lengths of coiled rope - and his eyes were the orange of highway cones. But the teeth were the worse. Every once in a while Grey would hear a little tinkling sound on the audio, and know it was the sound of one more tooth dropped from Zero's mouth to the cement. They rained down at the rate of half a dozen a day. These went into the incinerator, like everything else; it was one of Grey's jobs to sweep them up and it gave him the shivers to see them, long as little swords' you'd get in a fancy drink. Just the thing if, say, you wanted to unzip a rabbit and empty it out in two seconds flat.

The creatures were horrifying enough, but to imagine finding their teeth lying around everywhere, scary. I did take a bit of artistic license in creating what I would imagine their teeth to have looked like - not quite little swords... When I was playing around in the waxes - the longer pointer teeth didn't look as good, so I scaled them down and widened them out. I imagined the look of the teeth as they glinted in the light while coming out of the darkness. So I wanted them dark, but shiny, and utterly creepy. Oh... and the skull actually is not real - but amazingly realistic "movie quality" prop. I was fortunate enough to find one w/o most of it's teeth - perfect for what I wanted - making scary dentures.

It was a really fun project to work on - an art piece w/ no intention other than to create it.

I thought about making a necklace out of teeth - the way a hunter would string the teeth of their kills. I might at some point, but taking time away from making wedding rings was limited. So at some point, I might string them up to make an actual jewelry pieces. Or string each tooth individually as little pendants...

The etsymetal post will be up tomorrow on the blog, I think with the other members' pieces. Make sure to check it out - and read the book if you like post-apocalytic type stories.