Silverware Jewelry: From the Table to Your Earlobe

Spoon rings, fork bracelets, knife handle pendants: silverware jewelry is alive and well.  If you're wondering what your grapefruit spoon would look like dangling from your earlobe, you're envisioning silverware jewelry a little differently than the rest of us.  Or maybe you really would like to hang grapefruit spoons from your earlobes, in which case, you should.  Who am I to say that's not the next big trend?

The silverware jewelry I'm referring to, however, is slightly different.  The silver is bent, twisted, curled, manipulated in such a way that we can barely identify the utensil, making for a great conversation starter when there's a lull at the dinner table.

Check out these beautiful fork tine earrings from the etsy shop Revisions:

Or this lovely spoon ring from Silverware Jewelry Etc.: 

This past weekend at the Highland Park Art Festival I bought this wonderful fork bracelet from a local artist who calls his shop Tomforkery: 

I absolutely LOVE it!  It reminds me of music notes.  And that's all there is to say today, about the wonderful world of silverware jewelry.  

Natural Dyeing

It's been two years that I've been contemplating, researching, and looking forward to my inevitable first (real) natural dyeing experiment. In fact, I had a stash of onion skins sitting in my cupboard for about a year now. It was when I was WWOOFing in Canada that I was exposed to dye plants and how you can use them to produce natural and even sometimes rich colors of yellow, purple, green, brown, beige and red. I even attended a fair with my host family where we gave an indigo dye demonstration! So, ever the procrastinator (it's not laziness!), I waited for two years until I was presented an opportunity in a college Chemistry course to create my own lab project. My natural dye experiment was born!

You may be wondering how naturally dyeing fabric with plants, roots, berries, and even bugs relates to Chemistry at all. Well, I'm glad you asked. In order for the color to 'bite' to the fabric you usually need to add something to the mix to make it stick. In the distant past, urine was sometimes used. Being the civilized society we are today, we have a better way. So, metallic salts were found to partly attach to the fibers and partly to the dye so it wouldn't wash out right away. These are called mordants and the most common ones are alum (potassium aluminum sulphate) and iron (ferrous sulphate). Some of the other ones, like chrome, can be much more poisonous and their use is discouraged. In my project, we used red and yellow onion skins, blueberries, and black tea along with mordants of alum, iron, and copper.

When dyeing naturally you can only use natural fibers so in our experiment we used cotton and linen fabric so we could compare the results. Below are the results of all three dyes. Each had a different mordant and the darkest color was obtained with using the iron mordant.  My favorite result is the dark army green that was created using the onion skins and iron mordant.  

Dyeing with Tea

Red and Yellow Onion Skins

Blueberries- yum!

Even after washing, the colors held up well except the blueberry which lost it's lovely purple color. Overall, natural dyeing is a science with many variables and it is hard to get the same color twice. Factors such as amount used, temperature, pH, length of time, and even growing conditions of the plant effect the color. The good news is, every time is a surprise!

Rope Necklaces Abound

Lately, we've been enjoying the simple beauty of rope necklaces.  Our roping idols are OG by JM and this is what they do:

I'd say they do it pretty well, wouldn't you?

Armed with inspiration, we decided to venture into the world of rope jewelry for ourselves and see what we could come up with.  Below are some of our latest creations.  You can find them in our etsy shop!

Saint Paul Sunday Bike Ride...

Our ride started in downtown Saint Paul with my bike tires losing air and the air hose missing from the gas station.  We came to the conclusion that I would just have to pedal harder and deal with it.  The fresh air kept my pedaling complaints to a minimum and any whining that leaked out was carried away by the wind.

We then decided to ride up a hill for some reason, which led us past the light rail construction.  

The light rail construction runs straight past our apartment, where the the sound of drilling, plowing and hammering is alive and well.  This section of track, by the government buildings (ahem), appears to be complete.  Such a vision had me wondering how I'd sleep without a jackhammer pounding away outside my window.  I guess I have a rough transition period ahead.  

We rode on, past the capital and on toward the Cathedral of Saint Paul.  

This picture begs the question: is the subject of the photo trees, or the capital?

On our way to the Cathedral, we were rewarded with a hill.

At the Cathedral, we turned right and made our way down Selby Ave, home to some of our favorite restaurants like Fabulous Ferns, Moscow on the Hill (great patio out back) and W.A Frost, a place we've never been, but have heard many good things about.

Biking on Selby is a little rough, because there isn't a designated bike lane, so after awhile we decided to cut across to the lovely Summit Ave.  We rode past mansions and wondered who lived in them.  So fancy was this street that we began to question our casual-cool apparel.  It was decided that we did not look cool at all.  Then I took some pictures and hoped the homeowners wouldn't come outside and yell at me.  

So gorgeous 

Our ride along Summit concluded at the James J. Hill house, which I would very much like to tour someday soon.

Finally, we rode downhill toward the city.  

If Saint Paul Were a Movie...

I have a wild love affair with Saint Paul.  It's just such an interesting city in terms of history and architecture.  The Mississippi River runs right alongside it and I often find myself wandering down there.  Here are some pictures I took at twilight a few days ago.  If Saint Paul were the star of a movie, I'd like to think it would look something like this:

The setting: downtown Saint Paul, MN.

The time: just after sunset.

The characters: I don't know, because there are no people in this picture.  It's really just a cool picture of the docks.

The story: a riverboat that frees itself from the shoreline and takes a journey to the the Gulf.  

The tagline: even the dock can't keep this riverboat tied down.  (wow that was bad)