Frustrating Saturday and Redeeming Sunday

Have you ever had one of those creating days where nothing goes right?  Well, that was mom and me yesterday.  We have a commissioned piece for a friend's granddaughter.  The granddaughter wants peace sign earrings in blue.  So, mom sawed out four pairs of peace sign earrings.  Two pair I was going to enamel different blues, one pair was going to be done in reds for mom and the other pair in purples and greens for me.  Out of the four pair of earrings only one pair was not messed up yesterday.  I couldn't get anything to enamel right.  So freaking frustrating!

While I was enameling mom was working on the design for the May Art Bead Scene Challenge piece.  We were going to saw out hats for the piece but then we decided you wouldn't be able to tell they were hats.  So, mom and I decided to do something with the parasol.  Mom said she was so frustrated trying to come up with a design for a parasol that she almost gave up and told me to come up with something.  Mom prevailed and sawed out a parasol.

This morning I got over to mom's house early so we could work on sawing out more peace sign earrings and file and sand the pieces mom sawed out yesterday.  The sawing, filing and sanding took about three hours this morning and then it was off to enamel.  I had my fingers crossed that today would go better than yesterday and crossing my fingers helped!

This is a close up of one of the blue powdered enamels I was using today.  This is transparent Prussian Blue.

These are the earrings waiting to be put into the kiln.  The set on the right has three different transparent blues (Prussian blue, water blue, turquoise) on the earrings and the set on the left has Atlantic blue, skye blue and sprinkles of cobalt blue on them.

While I was enameling the earrings I also enameled this pendant.  It is a dove holding leaves.  I am really happy with the way this pendant turned out, especially after yesterday's fiasco of enameling.

Here are the finished earrings.  I made three different types of earrings which I will let my friend choose from for her granddaughter (I like giving people a choice - what I like, they may not like).

The last set of earrings I really like how the colors turned out (yes, I wrote down what I did) because I want to use those colors on 10 leaf pendants I need to enamel next weekend for a necklace mom wants to make.

Here is a shot of the piece we are working on for the May ABS.  This will have to be finished tomorrow because both mom and I have ran out of steam.  I am really happy with the way the pendant turned out and I can't wait to see what the finished piece is going to look like.  Stay tuned for more, hopefully tomorrow.