Confessions

I don't know about you, but I have a love/hate affair with jewelry. I don't wear jewelry, apart from a promise ring, and I truthfully wouldn't wear most of the jewelry I make because it would require me to dress better and I'm not willing to do that. I find I enjoy thinking about making jewelry more than I enjoy actually making it. In fact, I often find myself procrastinating about the making part. And--apparently this makes me weird--I like photographing my jewelry even more than I like thinking about making it.

I also like to make photo backgrounds (as well as think about making photo backgrounds), and I love to shop antique stores and junk shops for interesting photo props. Here are some of my recent acquisitions: an old tin box, an old metal cup, some cast iron spoons and a fork, an Army belt, and some old sheep shears. I got that Army belt from a junk store--unfortunately it was brand new when I bought it, so I hung it over the fence last fall and left it there for a few months and it looks better now. I might put it back out there again for a while.

I love the process of creating a mysterious vignette for a photo ("Oh look, there is a necklace draped artistically among an Army belt, an old book, and some crusty sheep shears. There's GOT to be a fascinating story there..." Oh yes, yes there is. One day a soldier, a sheep rancher, a librarian and a transvestite walked into a bar...)

Lately I have become enamored of old, tattered book covers. The more splotched and stained the better. I especially love ones that are embossed, but they're hard to find in a sufficiently abused condition. It's amazing how hard it is to fake decades of wear and tear. (I tried adding some extra splotches with bleach, but these old books are amazingly resistant to chemicals. I'm thinking that bottle of muriatic acid in the cupboard might have a use after all...)

I actually think that my fascination with making photo backgrounds is one of my procrastination techniques. When I find myself having creative urges, but feeling reluctant to actually make jewelry, I do a photo background instead. It's my way of "circling." For a while I was into stenciling, to try to create a kind of wallpaper effect but it didn't work out the way I wanted. That's a damask stencil there from Stencil Ease.

Some of the ideas I've been toying with lately are faking up old stuff using assorted materials, because sometimes legitimate old stuff is hard to come by. For example, the weave on a flour sack towel (generally available at the grocery store) is just loose enough to resemble an old cloth book, or an old rustic tablecloth (plus they're relatively cheap). I glue them to a square of MDF (medium density fiberboard--you can get giant sheets at Home Depot and have them cut into smaller pieces)--this way they're ready to go when I need them and they don't get all wrinkled in a drawer somewhere.

For the two squares below, I painted one, and tea-stained the other. I added a strip of ribbon to the painted one to suggest a book binding (or something) and tried some faked up stains. I used acrylic paints. On the other, I stained it with tea bags and threw some lace from the fabric store across it, which I had also tea-stained. The lace isn't stained enough so I might have to singe it with an iron (I have experience with that).

Maybe I'll add a giant crusty key and a mug when I use the second one in a picture--"Look, I took a picture of this necklace on the kitchen table in an old farmhouse in Provence while the French people were having breakfast. They didn't mind."

I like the blue one too. Close-up, it could be an old bellboy uniform that's seen better days, or maybe a vintage photo album, or perhaps even the moth-eaten canopy on an old Victorian pram. (See, people will think you have awesome historical artifacts in your house with fascinating stories behind them. "Yes, my great grandfather was a bellboy and one day he walked into a bar with a soldier, a sheep rancher, a librarian and a transvestite...")

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Here is a sedimentary rock or Mediterranean stucco experiment, depending. It ended up looking more like a frosted cake than Mediterranean stucco. I am thinking of putting sprinkles on it.

I also like using framed pictures as backgrounds. I've had these picture frames below forever, but I haven't gotten around to using them because I hate the colors and need to repaint them, but I can't make up my mind what colors to paint them. I'm putting old family photos in them. For now I've just printed the photos on my laser printer to give you an idea, but I will need to have them printed on photo paper. I've found that photos work better as backgrounds if they have more white space in them, so the two at the bottom might not work.

I like to use them like this:

Or with just a corner of a frame showing:

I got these really cool embossed papers from 32NorthSupplies. I thought I could glue them onto a piece of wood or MDF and then paint over them and make them look like faked up embossed book covers or faked up (are you sensing a theme here) architectural details from some posh but dilapidated pied-a-terre. Or something. Something mysterious. The cool thing about using stuff like this in jewelry photography, is that it's so close up, it's not necessary for the person looking at it to know what it is; it only needs to look vaguely interesting. It's all about suggestion. Maybe that's what I like about doing these backgrounds--they're not literal, identifiable things, they're just vague suggestions. I am a big fan of vague suggestions. (Like, "Maybe you would enjoy taking a long walk off a short pier?")

This actually ended up looking more like whitework embroidery to me. I'm going to go over it with more paint and maybe some gilder's paste to bring out the detail and give it a more worn and aged look. Or maybe I'll just hang it on the fence with the Army belt.

I also bought some cheap placemats a few years ago thinking they might make interesting photo backgrounds, but I didn't like the colors. I decided to paint them. I have no idea if these will look right with jewelry on them but they worked well as a jewelry-making avoidance technique. If they don't work, I'll hang them on the fence with the Army belt and see what happens.

Well, today is my birthday, and I am going to reward myself by doing whatever I want so I'm off to the grocery store to buy sprinkles for my Mediterranean stucco cake.