Worthing Open House event is drawing closer

http://worthingopenhouses.com/
This year I'm opening our house as a venue during the Worthing Arts Festival. I have two good friends and award winning artists exhibiting along with my jam tart :- Award winning photographer Gary Eastwood who is working on new creations for the exhibition as I type http://www.garyeastwood.co.uk/ AND  Richard Bett http://www.richardbett.com/ who will be showing his fabulous jewellery and supplying the garden sculpture.
I have commissioned Richard to make me many pieces of awesome jewellery over 20 years and will be exercising some restraint not to keep all of peices on show for myself!!!
This extravaganza will take place at my abode - 90 Marlowe Road, Worthing BN14 8EZ. Tel:0780 3002434
over the following weekends 18th & 19th  and 25th & 26th of June and the 2nd & 3rd July.
Do come along to view the work and share a cup of tea and slice of home-made cake. Please do a sun dance for us.

Little Urchin II

I have been beavering away getting the house and garden finished for the open house ( www.worthingopenhouses.com ) as well as making more things for the show AND working of course!

Here's a few pics of Little Urchin II which has a slightly different texture than the first - plus plump overspill bits around the pyrite.

I haven't waxed this one yet which means it doesn't have the depth of colour of the previous one, but it accentuates the texture because the tiny recesses which avoided my polishing tool have stayed matt. Don't know if I'll polish it at all.....maybe I will....maybe I won't.....I'm like that!

Little Urchin

I've finished another peice inspired by the gladioli corms. I've called it Little Urchin for what I think are obvious reasons.
The exterior is textured polished plaster with an Iron Pyrite sun (also known as coal dollars) set into the top.
I'm going to make a few of these in different sizes. this one is 6 inches across. The pic below shows an uncleaned sun.

 The guys who do this for a living use Hydrocholic Acid to dissolve the coal covering them, but somehow I didn't fancy that method in my kitchen sink so I relied on good old household limescale remover and elbow grease. You can get them all clean and bright, but I liked this one as it is. I love working with natural materials as they are never the same shape, pattern or colour....these pyrite suns range from silver through gold and even rainbow metalic colours. You never know what you are going to get until it's clean and dry. In the photos you can't quite see how shiny and metallic these are.
It's a very tactile little chap.

The Light Thiefs Daughter

A smaller geode than the last with a 15cm span. Gilded inside and out with 23 3/4 carat gold. The inside has real baroque pearl "stalagmites", matt black stone slick and pyrite formations. There are also weeny pyrite crystals in the fissures on the outside
I like the idea of leaving these geodes unfixed on the base so that the viewer can turn them however they fancy.

Nearly finished Baroque Corm II

I've been beavering away at a couple of things including one of the Cormel forms and have nearly finished. I just want to add a little patination to some of the silver gilded spheres. I can't decide whether to mount it on a black shiny plinth or one of the formed leather things I like making....which do you think?

New work on the go

Like so many peoples my home is ever in a state of evolvement or in other words covered in dust thanks to my latest building project.
The first thing I did when we moved into our present home was knock down the wall between the kitchen and dining room to give us a much bigger kitchen (I do love the cooking) and a dining space so that when we do have the luxury of guests for dinner I'm not stuck in another room for most of the night. Three years later and I've finally boxed in the support beam.
However, being me I can't just paint it - no, I have to come up with a textured finish to run up the wall and along the beam. Then I thought, well I can't just have that because it will look disjointed so I'm going to do a large piece for the chimney breast in the dining area to go with it.
I really fancied something in a rippled antique silver and spent hours on the net looking for inspiration. I came across some beautiful ceramic mosaic tiles with an antique silver texture. Naturally they are well expensive so I started playing with texture pastes and metal leaf to get the feel.

I'm thinking of a great sweeping fracture running through this texture with amethyst and pyrite crystals errupting out of the vein. Around 1.4 x 1.4 meters square

Finished Baroque cormel 1

Finally - the finished cormel.
I plumped for nickel/zinc wire used for electronics. It may be a little finer than I envisaged, but it crumpled into naturalistic tendrils really nicely.
Now I'm mulling over what kind of plinth to mount it on....maybe  20mm toughened glass.