Saturday, September 26, 2009

26.9.09 Deco Lotus Earrings designed by Gwen Fisher

The instructions for these beautiful earrings can be found in the current Beadwork issue, Volume 12, number 6, October/November 2009, pp.52-53.
When colours have been already chosen, an earring took about 30 mn only!
This was a fun and fairly quick project with a very nice result, to my opinion.
Thank you Gwen for sharing this beautiful design with the Beadwork magazine readers'!

Friday, September 25, 2009

25.9.09 RAW Waves of Symmmetry designed by Cindy Caraway

Instructions can be found in Bead & Button Magazine, Issue 93, October 2009, pp. 42-44.
It took about 6 hrs to accomplish.

Check Cindy's original bracelet!

Friday, September 11, 2009

10-11.9.09 L'atelier de la Quintefeuille, un p'tit message a Véronique Erramuzpe et La Bouclaine

I gathered in this post a small summary on the artists and Art stuff we crossed during our honey moon trip to Spain and the French Pay-Basque during this September.

Let's start with Monique-Marie Levent which is an incredibly talented and creative artist located in Bayonne that I discovered in my visit this time. Monique-Marie has a very interesting story, being a gallery curator years ago in Paris till she decided to create by herself and have her own studio to sell her art creations.
She told me she learnt a lot from the work with autodidact French artists and now she creates in many different mediums. As part of her multidisciplinarity, she paints, knits, crochet, beads, embroiders, sculpts with various materials: wire, plastic, ceramic, polymer clay and so on. I had a very special visit in her studio and felt absolutely overwhelmed. I strongly recommend you to visit her and her shop, if you stop by in Bayonne:

L' atelier de la Quintefeuille - Monique-Marie Levent
Tel: +33 5 59591489, 9 Rue Port de Castets, 64100 Bayonne, France



My last and 1st meeting with Véronique Erramuzpe was about 3 years ago (12th of July 2006), during the Medieval fair in Bayonne. Seeing her genius furnitures gave me a strong push to learn to make cardboard furnitures. That was about the beginning of my "Art/Craft" life, after a long period of "Scientific" life :-)
Unfortunately, I missed Veronique, she was resting in the "siesta" hours, so I've just left her a small message. Omer took a picture of me at that time and it became our blessing to all my friends and family for the new Hebrew year to come (תש"ע).


Véronique Erramuzpe

Tel: +33 5 59 46 18 79, 13 Rue Luc, 64100 Bayonne, France

Now:
3 years ago at the same place:So Happy new year to you too and Shana Tova!

Finally, we spent a wonderful afternoon looking for the Angora goat farm in Barcus, in the middle of no-where. That was fantastic! We met a charming couple that were so so kind to show us the way till we could see the sign to "Barcus 9km".They drove in front of us for about 10-15 mn to show us the way on the beautiful narrow villages' roads and this scene just reminds me Naomi Shemer's famous song:

"אנשים טובים באמצע הדרך, אנשים טובים מאוד...
"
Good people in the middle of the way, very good people...

if you want to listen, just listen - don't watch this (the song is the original one, the performance - totally unclear).
We saw butterflies on the way and beautiful landscapes, till we finally found this great farm in which we went to with my parents and sisters 17 years ago on the 30th of July 1992 (I know that thanks to my diary as a kid), as I said before, in the middle of nowhere. Mom bought then a beautiful sweater that she is still wearing and Mazal bought some skeins. Few months ago - I was looking at this sweater that mom has and was wondering. I noticed some holes in the sleeves edges and I told myself "I wish I knew how to correct these holes one day...and I wish I knew knitting" I am not there yet, but I feel I am on the way and that's a great feeling too.

Marie Perraud welcomed us very nicely from the back yard. She showed us the cute goats, imported from Quebec and then opened for us the little shop. I was almost tempted to buy a beautiful deep purple scarf, but I finally preferred to buy some skeins. They are so soft! She also has an online shop, in case you might be interested.

La Bouclaine
Marie PERRAUD - Maison. Agas - Barcus - France Tél. : 05 59 28 92 06
Chèvres Angora à BARCUS au PAYS BASQUE, dans les PYRENEES ATLANTIQUES.



Leaving Barcus, a nice old man was playing to his dog with two flutes at the same time. Curious, we stopped to try to catch a picture, but instead we got a warm invitation from a kind Basque man to have a refreshment on our way back to Spain and the Pyrenees.
That's it for today. I hope you can enjoy Omer's picture as much as I can when I see them and recall the places we have been at and the kind people we met.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

2.9.09 Amigurumi Tea Cup Pincushion

Amigurumi Tea Cup Pincushion Lion Brand free pattern.
I used size 2mm Hook and cotton thread (50 gr/125 m).