This wasn’t actually the next piece I planned to make. A piece inspired by ivory shards, a trumpets made from thigh bones and chunks of coral is half made up. And rattling around my head is something inspired by the long turquoise and coral earring of the fabulous single earringed horseman who galloped down the main street of Tsingri. It is an impressive earring when you can see it on a rapidly galloping man!!! These pieces will emerge in time. One thing I am learning about creativity is the importance of patient gestation.

Regular readers, bless you, will know that I am reflecting on our journey to Tibet 20 years ago.  I am rereading my journal and all my collected Tibet books. My camera died on the trip so I don’t have many photos. It’s good that I go on in tedious great detail in my journal. (Did I mention all the fabulous browns? So many browns).

Karo La is a pass that is 5045m high. I wrote about the breathlessness,  snow capped peaks, the reds and oranges and greens…and the browns. Nomads rushed out to sell breathless travellers rock hard cheese and rock like crystals (which were more of a rocky than a crystal kind) and when one asked where they from, the answer was tailor made to where you wanted then to be from. Mt. Kailash?…then yes! They were from Kailash. Up the nearby Nojin Kangsten glacier? Yes. It is from there too.  The crystallish rocks (from a bead shop) in one of the photos are my nod to the memory.  We didn’t buy “crystals” from the nomads…too smart to be sucked in… and now I wish we had.

In my journal I wrote, The glacier tumbled right down to the road and it was this phrase that needed to be expressed!  Especially the feeling of tumbling, and I have tried to create a piece with a tumbling feeling. And one that evoked the colours (the greeny browns), the roiling angry sky of the day, and the churned, dangerous glacier.  It is a rather different piece for me. I mentioned the browns a lot but don’t often use those browny greens, or the greeny browns, in my art. And churning/tumbling/roiling doesn’t get much of a look in either so this was an adventure in different territory. Just like the trip to Tibet!

Well can I just say that it was fortunate for you lot that I didn’t write a post a couple of weeks ago when I was composing the post in my head. It would have been a miserable, self pitying rant about what giant mistake I had made getting this surgery done. I would have talked about all this green stuff I made to deal with my intense morosity. Is that a word? Should be.

But…lucky for you, finger never actually got to keyboard and time passed and BLOW ME DOWN if things didn’t improve somewhat. Everyone around me said all the things that I said as a therapist when I worked in brain injury rehabilitation…be kind to yourself, trust the process, be patient, do the homework regularly, same for everyone and it will get better. Thank goodness no one person said al of those things at once or I would possibly have decked them. And all these things were true. Life is still not acoustically rosy but it is much better and I am starting to make sense of the electronica in my brain. I no longer feel like I am living in an MRI machine (Ok, that was a slight whinge but it was such a good description of what it was like it seemed ad shame to waste it!)  The robotic speech I hear is now gendered and sometimes even inflected and I am hearing sounds I never knew were sounds! Like the washing machine coming on, referee’s whistles, car indicators. Who knew? Nearly everyone else but me.

In the midst of this I made green stuff. I used my long neglected extruder and distracted myself from my potentially giant mistake. It may have been significant that I hardly made any earrings (didn’t want to think about ears). I made wild knuckle duster rings and necklaces. And all this was a single hued (but many toned, tinted and shaded) exploration that will be enlarged on in my next post but for now…lets go GREEN!

Last week on my sporadically frequented social media accounts I posted a photo of some pieces I made to mark the beginning of another journey! Most of you know that I am deaf as a post (diagnostic terminology) and that I could have got a cochlear implant years ago.  I finally got it last week (and can I just say that I had underestimated just a tad how uncomfortable the post surgery period would be).  This is very much the beginning of the journey because an implant doesn’t amplify sound like a hearing aid does, but transmits an electronic sounds. My brain has to be retrained to recognise this sound and this will take time and effort and more of that later. THAT starts with my activation tomorrow.

Back to the post. I decided, as you do, to mark the various stages of this journey with my making and made these pieces over the days before the surgery.  I wanted to incorporate the motifs of shells because the cochlear is a shell shaped structure and the cilia, the nerve endings.  I chose calming, gentle colours because I needed to be calmed and gentled!

I used a ball stylus to hand etch the shell designs then applied layers of the gorgeous Pan pastels. Then I used several ball styluses (stylii?) to make the dot and cilia marks before applying more layers of pastel.  I used Cara Jane’s lovely surfboard templates to make the earrings and a brooch held with a magnet. More to come as I negotiate the slightly daunting road ahead but I know the negotiation will be easier if done creatively!

Hello my darling ladies,

(Going out on a limb a bit there re gender! Correct me if I am wrong)

I dropped the ball a bit with my daily posts (we could all see that coming) but it was mindful ball dropping. I began enthusiastically at the start of the lockdown but the internet got so bloody noisy so I kept wearing my daily earrings and posted them on @sociallydistantearrings on Instagram but stopped rambling on. The internet version of whispering I hope.

I have been walking. A lot. I am very lucky to have a great place to walk within ten paces of my back door. I sometimes spend several hours walking, stopping to meditate or make mandala type thingies. (I only use seeds and pods and leaves as I am mindful of not moving rocks etc.) Then I come home and head to my studio where I have been exploring some new techniques (for me).

True confessions time….when I began with polymer in the dim dark depths of time over 30 years ago, I was bit of a purist. I was…a caner.  And only a caner. I prided myself in saying, often in bold capital letters, no paint has been used. You could almost imagine me crossing my fingers in front of my face.  I loved caning with a passion (if you are wondering WTF I am talking about read this). I still do love caning and I make some really really complex canes.

But over the last few years I have come to understand (call me a slow learner) that caning is just a tool…a process. It is just one way for me to say what I want to say or to express the idea I want to express. Other fabulously exciting and effective ways include surface treatments like painting, texturing, carving and printing.  I have done all these things for ages but realised the purist still lurked a bit telling me that this was somehow less…pure. Well, I have told the purist to be buggered and am having a heap of fun. The best fun is actually combining the techniques.

It was a bit like saying I only cook Nepalese food.  Or I would cook other cuisines but that when I did that, I wasn’t really cooking. Now I am exploring a heap of cuisines now and, guess what, it is all cooking!

Recently, I’ve been looking at the work of a number of ceramic artists and I love how they used stamps. I decided to try carving myself some stamps from scrap clay and then set myself the challenge of using these in ten different ways. This been such a good exercise!! I will post more photos in a few days and hope you enjoy seeing how one thing can trigger such fun!

I can’t quite recall what got me onto reading Genevieve Williamson‘s blog but I am so glad I started. After a nanosecond I signed up for her newsletter and there began a friendship which I value enormously. She is a gem.  I (like many others!!) adore Genevieve’s work and after surviving a tough time several years ago I treated myself to a Genevieve Williamson necklace as a You made it gift to myself. The necklace was inspired by a quote by Clementine Paddleford (what a fabulous name?) who said Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.” I felt like I’d shown some backbone!  I have this necklace on right now, in splendid isolation, with the fabulous drop earrings I got to go with it.

Do you like the board I painted to show earrings on? As I said on IG, she is exactly like me except for the absence of eyes, hearing aids, age spots, facial hair and wrinkles. But the lipstick and hair colour is bang on.

Just do yourself a favour and look at Gen’s website and the simply extraordinarily beautiful works of art on it.  I think you will start breathing more slowly, feel soothed, calmed, and ready to face whatever comes next with backbone.

People who know me know that I have a very conflicted relationship with social media.  I basically hate nearly everything about it but use it of necessity.  I am not SO narrow though that I cannot see the positives. I am just not totally sure that they out weigh the negatives. But this makes me sound very snarky and I am not really. Much.

For the next 5 days, I will wear earrings that celebrate some good things from social media…mainly connections with gorgeous people which may not have happened without it. I have already referred to Kate and Heidi who began as Instagram friends and today’s earrings celebrate another friendship born of a social media connection.

Early on in my involvement with Samunnat Nepal, a dear friend Mel told me I should contact the legendary  Cynthia Tinapple of PCD and tell her about the ladies and what was happening over there. Me being me I didn’t, but Mel being Mel she encouraged me to until I did.  To cut long and fabulous story short, Cynthia was thrilled to hear about the amazing Nepali girls and how they were using polymer clay to escape lives dominated by violence.  She came and visited (twice!!) bringing with her all sorts of resources including our beloved Simmons slicer (thanks Dorothy too!!) One of the many things we learnt from Cynthia was how to make what we called our shisha veneer which she designed especially for her trip to us. Later on, with the extraordinary help of also legendary Ron Lehocky she rallied the polymer community to help us raise thousands of dollars to build our home. Cynthia learnt the delights of a good mustard oil massage and the best time of year to meet mosquitoes.

These earrings always make me think of darling Cynthia and the very special time we had together there in Nepal. A time that may never have happened without horrible social media.

Did you all realise it was a weekend? Harder to pick the difference in these days of the new normal.

I realise that a lot of the earring posts are really about connections. If the most I can do is to connect lovely people with other lovely people or lovely things (via links or photos or whatever) then…that’s enough!  I sometimes think that is my role on the Colourful Journey….cue wistful sigh…connecting wonderful people to each other.

I am catching up a bit today.  Yesterday I was obsessively walking or gardening. But OF COURSE wearing earrings. Yesterday’s earrings are on high rotation. I made them using veneers I made in an online class called Matrix Canes by Dan Cormier.  Dan and I work differently. Dan works with precision and exactitude and I sometimes work less precisely and exactly but I learn SO much from his classes. I learn techniques but also about another way of working, another approach, that I can modify for what works in my studio.  I have now done several of Dan’s online classes and he and his partner Tracy have donated a place in the classroom to the Samunnat ladies just about every time they do a class.

I made today’s drops using two gorgeous silver beads from Millennium Crafts in Thamel, Kathmandu. We sometimes go there on our trip. It is one of those really tricky to find places that are well worth the effort hunting down. A place where it is good to have local knowledge or you could end up in a dance bar with cabin. Don’t ask.  Today I wore these earrings on a cold, windy walk to Mt Ainslie’s quarry. I wanted to find an old dump I had heard about and I did. But decided that it would be better to return wearing heavier boots rather than runners!!  I may have had the wrong shoes but I did have the right earrings.