Of shells, shards, shapes and sheilas...

...and I could have included shaligrams and shamans but that would have been taking alliteration to extremes. ( We wouldn't want wildly wanton wordage would we?)I've been nomadic over the past couple of weeks staying in Sydney, Adelaide and touching base occasionally in the Hill.  Just often enough to see Spring arriving here.  The Sturt Desert Pea - not pictured.  (But there's got to be a necklace there....my experiments of 12 months ago are still very much experimental.) And I know they are weeds, but Rosy Dock and Salvation Jane make a wonderful display.  I'm a sucker for crimson and violet.I made another version of the Shell/ Shaligram necklace and like how it sits now that I have added tubes to the top.  I was very careful to make sure they adhered to the shell all the way along (wet clay onto wet clay) and strung them with paper thin layers of real shell.  They look nice with the Nepali dakka from Dhukuti Sisters don't they?Six hours of solo driving is a lot of thinking time and resulted in ideas of how to improve the studio (a mid strength clean up and a new table.  Is this because Spring is around the corner?); notions about a small figure with wired, beaded arms etc; the need to make life size, sari draped, card board Nepali figures and colourful flags to entice people into the stall at the Designers' Market on Saturday, and several necklace ideas. Had to pull over and scribble on my hand for want of accessible paper!  My Nepali sheilas are currently in pieces but I think they will be a bit of fun!  Obviously the cardboared versions are stop gap.  Even one as sometimes fanciful/ driven as me acknowledges that making stuffed 3D ones in the time available was a long shot and likely to induce stress!My shard necklace is still a work in progress.  I will write more about this another time but it is a response to a conversation I had with my mum when I was in Sydney.  I am currently sanding, painting, rebaking and resanding the shards ready to play with them.  To think for a minute there I had nice fingernails.  The vague idea is that of a necklace reminiscent of the shaman necklaces worn in Mali.  I have been reading Africa Adorned by Angela Fisher which I got for MJM many, many years ago when he was intensely interested in African jewellery.  It is a classic and one of the two I look to repeatedly for inspiration. JRM gave me the other-The World Wide History of Beads by Lois Sherr Dubin.  You could spend a month being inspired by a single page of either book.And while I was sharding, I also made some shapes textured with Tibetan script which will come together (I hope) in a kind of Africo-Tibetan melange!  So much to make, so little time.  Here's hoping for photos of some finished things next post!