The Daily Delaney

Okay, so I love animals. I love their energy, their honesty, their directness, their sincerity. I love that they tell you what they want and when they don't get it, they find something just as interesting to want just as much. I love that they figure out how to get us to do things. I love that we think that WE train THEM. I love that they don't hold grudges unless someone beats it into them. I love that they know when we need to get up and refuse to give up until we get out of the damned bed... at least my cats do. I hardly ever do jewelry pieces that are simply "an animal" ... even if i do do something like a lion or a wolf, the beast blurs the line between animal and human. Like in any good cartoon, I think the difference between people and critters isn't much at all once you get past the whole consonant and opposable thumb thing. So when i do find a cool animal pin or scrap of one, I try to do a piece where you have a person relating to an animal, like this on...

Sometimes, I just go totally stream of consciousness at my workbench and I come up with things like this... My friend Carolyn had set me to work that week, trying to come up with things that were pink (you'll see them eventually). I blended up some hot pink clay, broke out my box of pre-broke jewelry and off i went. Did a dozen random designs around the color pink. The next day, i did purple, the day after,red, and finally blue! So I blended the clay, then went to my pile o'stuff and found that thing on top of her head. It started life as a really inexpensive dangly earring. I had cut off the dangles and turned them into eyes (I'll post that eventually as well) and was left with that strange four circle prismy thing. When I turned it sideways , it looked sort of like a Mickey Mouse hat and then i could see the rest of the face... a parent who had spent too many hours wandering around somebody else's idea of a magic kingdom. This piece is available in my Etsy store.

So I realized a couple of things this week. One was that I had been doing this a long time. Along with that, I realized that I've done literally thousands of pieces of wearable art and other sculptures over the years. And once they're out of my hands, I don't really think about them again.Part of that is just the nature of my work... I'm always looking for the next thing to turn upside down and use the wrong way. Truth be told, I think a big part of it is that I tend to barrel through life and not look back. Am I afraid that somebody is going to bust me for just making it up as I go along? Maybe so. But as I barrel along, some pretty remarkable things happen. Thia weekend for instance, I did a show and a wonderful woman rolled up on a scooter chair, clutching a postcard that I had printed at least six years ago (I'm sure she hadn't had it THAT long, but I know I haven't handed that card out in a couple of years). She told me how happy she was to find me and ...