Linda's Magic Workshop - Linda Britt Design

Look how close he is! I can see his red eye with the white eye ring. See those long thin red legs? He looks like he is dressed in his best tuxedo White throat and belly with that contrast of black Carefully picking his way through the shallow water Looking for food with his long, thin, straight black bill. He pecks and plunges his head into the water To capture fish and beetles and tadpoles. Ah! The simplicity and elegance of nature! Linda Britt

This is such a good time of year for conversation, being thankful and enjoying life.   I watched these two Northern Pintails (ducks) having just such a conversation – at least that’s what I thought!   Today’s blog is a picture story of ‘Conversation’.

Recently I decided to clean out the master bedroom closet.   It is a long narrow walk in closet and the coldest place in the house in the winter.   It was now or wait until spring.   I began with the usual – going through the hanging clothes and then the shoes and last the boxes that never got unpacked from the last move.   That was when the fun began!   When I opened a small box of handkerchiefs I could almost smell the lilac fragrance my grandmother was so found of.   There was a stack of my mother’s and grandmother’s beautiful handkerchiefs I had forgotten about.   Both women loved the femininity of the embroidery and lace on batiste and fine linen fabric.   They never went anywhere without a clean ironed square in their purses.     Finding those handkerchiefs got me to thinking about handkerchiefs in general and I did a little research.   It seems that King Richard II of England , who reigned from 1377 to 1399, was responsible for the original squares of fabric for nose

How do you store your finished projects? Please leave your solutions in the comment box and I’ll share them.   As I look around my studio, I see earrings on cards and earrings on stands.   I see necklaces stacked next to each other on the necklace jewelry stand. Necklaces hang from hooks on the side of my cabinet.     I see a necklace on a neck display stand, stacks of bracelets and so much more.    It’s a little overwhelming.   I think I am hyperventilating!   Too much of everything takes my mind away from creating and leaves me wondering what to do with it all.   How can I make more?   Where would I put it and how can I rationalize buying more supplies for more jewelry making?   Surely I’m not the only jewelry designer/artist with this problem?   I need a sy stem for storing the finished pieces that are listed in my website store www.lindabrittdesign.com and on my etsy shop www.etsy.com/shop/lindabrittdesign .   Focus!   That’s what I need!   And more sales! My soluti

Cormorants Visit Santee Lakes and Hang Out! There is nothing like a weekend getaway to widen and relax one’s perspective.   We drove from Prescott AZ to Coronado Island CA and stayed at a friend’s lovely home.   The reason?   An early music concert by Concerto Koln http://www.concerto-koeln.de/home_welcome.php?lang=eng  at Irwin M. Jacobs Qualcomm Hall in San Diego.   What an amazing evening.   The baroque music was exquisite and the hall, designed for the San Diego Symphony, was perfect for the instruments.   The evening’s highlight for me was   Vivaldi’s ‘Concerto for Recorder, Strings, and Continuo in C, RV 443’ with Cordula Breuer playing the Sopranino Recorder.   I had not seen or heard this instrument before.   Picture the recorder you played in grade school and make it 6” long.   It was amazing to watch and listen to an artist playing with her fingers literally flying.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder Another day we went birding at the Santee Lakes.   What a show

One of the things I love about Facebook is being directed to tutorials concerning subjects of interest to me.   For instance, I’d been playing with swirls and lentil polymer beads when I spotted a link chock full of helpful hints.      https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6Oq0G54jIYk   Thanks to Cindy Lietz, my beads look much better and I understand about getting the colors more or less where I want them.   If you haven’t seen this video, you just might want to!   A few months ago, I made red and white and ivory canes based on a quilt pattern design.   I made them in various sizes of squares and put them away thinking they would be great for the Christmas holidays.   This week they came out of their box and I started making buttons and earrings. What to do with the scraps?   Lentil swirl beads of course!   I’m having such fun forming my polymer balls and putting the scrap canes in a band around the outside.    Then I take my clear acrylic sheet, start

Taking a day trip to Jerome AZ should not be such a big deal for three girlfriends since we live in Prescott – not so far away.   Finding a day that worked for all of us took a while!   I’ve wanted to go to Nellie Bly ‘the biggest kaleidoscope store in the world’ for 16 years!   They have been open for 25 years but I’ve only known they existed for 16.     We left at 10 a.m. and lunched in Jerome at ‘Grapes’.   Each of us ordered a different dish and shared great food and fun.     Sounds like a girl’s day out, doesn’t it?   We visited just about every store.   Of course, I stayed in Nellie Bly’s a long time.   I just missed the annual workshop teaching how to make those incredible tubes of color and changing shapes.   It’s on my calendar for next year. If you haven’t guessed, I’m crazy for kaleidoscopes.   Once when there were many things happening in my life, I took a class called ‘Changes’.   There was discussion on why and how changes affect us, what we could do to help ou

One of the benefits of taking online classes is building an arsenal of techniques that can be drawn on to produce the design that is in the mind’s eye.     After practicing making transfers to polymer in Heather Campbell’s class, a design idea popped into my head that could incorporate some of my own photographs into my polymer jewelry.   Looking through my photographs (I have hundreds..really) and deciding which images to use took a little time!   I made digital copies and turned them into black and white photographs, reduced them to contact sheet size and printed them using the toner printer.    Then I rolled out the creamy blend of white and Sahara Fimo polymer clay to #3, placed it on a tile and put a thin coating of clay softener over the clay.   The cut out images were placed upside down on the clay.   As you can see from the photo to the finished piece, the image is reversed.  If there is writing that is very important!  Learning to burnish the images with my fing