Red-Tail Designs

The beads woven into this bracelet reflect the colors of the morning glories in my garden.

This week I sent off four custom horse hair pieces to their owners. Hoepfully they’re all happily wearing them right now!

Custom work always makes you stretch. Sometimes it stretches an idea you already have.  This customer asked for turquoise-colored leather rather than the standard brown. Brilliant idea! I’m going to try some other colors in the future.

The bracelet is reversible so you can wear the horse hair side out or the leather side out.

Other days it’s a stretch to find all the supplies. Inevitably, my manufacturer decides to discontinue the one finding I use a lot. Then it’s off on the treasure hunt again, finding a new supplier or replacement part. That was my reality this week as I worked on a quote for a new piece.

With the two round horse hair bracelets below, the client requested magnetic clasps so the bracelets were easy to get on and off. Part of that treasure hunt was finding super strong magnetic clasps that can withstand a little tugging. This is a bracelet after all.

Fabulous Four: Recent custom pieces.

Sometimes custom work just stretches your brain to create a new style that matches the vision of your clients. I have that challenge coming up as I embark on 5 new custom pieces in the coming weeks.

The most important thing I’ve learned from doing custom pieces is to capture a clipping of horse tail from your horse now.  I often meet people who wish they had some piece of their horse now that it’s gone. After their horse has passed they understandable don’t feel they can cut off a piece of its tail.

So if you do one thing today, make a momento of something important in your life. Whether its your horse, your child, a favorite fishing hole, a secret vacation spot, your best recipe, record the here and now of it. Take a picture. Write down what it stirrs in you. I know you won’t regret it.

Dancer from the Spring Powwow

The August Powwow at the Museum of Indian Culture snuck up on me! It’s next weekend.

Thoughts of quilling turtles and birds got me up the hills on my 4-mile run the other day. Hopefully I’ll have time this week to put those ideas down on leather.

Visit the tipi in the LifeWays area.

If you haven’t any plans for these beautiful days of summer, come on by and see Native American Indians show off their regalia and dancing skills. The Powwow runs from 10:30 a.m. until 6 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday, August 16 and 17. Dancing doesn’t start until after opening ceremonies at noon. Then chow on a buffalo burger or Lakota taco. Yum!

I’ll be in the LifeWays area, demonstrating porcupine quillwork and selling my quill and horse hair jewerly. If you’re thinking of getting horse hair jewelry made, come on by with your tail. I can show you the styles in person.

Speaking of horse hair, I have a new Horse Hair Bracelet class coming up at Out of Our Hands on September 21, 2008. The class will last from noon to 2:30 p.m. and you’ll walk away with a horse hair bracelet you created with your own hands.

Porcupine quill plaiting technique.

On September 20 I’ll be teaching Quillworking at the Museum of Indian Culture. Quillwork Part 1 will go from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and Quillworking Part 2 will be 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.

See the events page for more details.

Hope to see you next weekend!

Fireman's name engraved on the back.

I sent this custom horse hair bracelet off a week or so ago.

Oscar's name engraved on the front.

Hopefully by now the owner of Fireman and Oscar has it in her hands or on her arm. Her friend had this bracelet made after she lost both of these horses in one short month. Her friend wanted a memorial of the two and asked me to make the bracelet with the stainless steel nameplated engraved front and back with the horses’ names. Both horses’ tails are woven into this bracelet.

The barn where she kept the horses also creates memorial stones for lost horses. The stones and bracelet arrived within days of each other so both could be presented at the same time to the owner. They were presented together so we’ll “only have her cry once,” her friend said.

Here’s to Oscar and Fireman.

On a lighter note, I’m off to class this weekend to learn metalsmithing with Doug Salmon. The class is through the Pennsylvania Guild of Crafters, and I’m hoping to come away with not only $175 worth of handmade jewelry (that’s the promise from the class literature), but also some new applications for my horse hair jewelry. I already have ideas brewing and hopefully we’ll cover ringmaking because I’m anxious to develop a horse hair ring using silver to protect the horse hair.

Someone suggested I could encase the horse hair in resin to prevent wear and tear of the horse tail. Obviously this was not a horse person, for he didn’t understand that horse people would actually want to touch the horse hair.

I realized this is only the second art/crafting class I’ve ever taken. Sure I had art class in school and learned a variety of crafts in Girl Scouts and from my mom. But last year’s Precious Metal Clay class was the first time I ever paid an expert to teach me something.

Interesting, considering how many different classes I’ve taught. I taught basic jewelry making at Michaels craft store, horse hair work at local stores and porcupine quillwork at the Indian Museum. All these crafts (and many others I’ve tried) were self taught, requiring lots of trial and error to get it right.

That was back in the day when I had seemingly endless amounts of time. Now, it’s great to have an expert show me in 2 days what I could take years trying to learn on my own. So off I go to burn up some silver (they’re not letting us near gold…too expensive these days!) and brass and copper. I’ll let you know how it goes.

This is Wenda, modeling horse hair earrings. She made them on Sunday at Out of Our Hands during the Horse Hair Earring Class.

Wenda brought some of her beloved Opie’s tail to class. She cleaned the hair ahead of time and was ready for braiding as soon as she walked in the door.

We had a great time at the class, braiding and gluing, chatting and creating. Wenda walked away with a momento of her favorite horse and can tell everyone, “I made these myself!”

If you’re interested in attending upcoming classes Horse Hair Earrings or Horse Hair Bracelets, contact me or Out of Our Hands. We’re putting together dates for these two classes now. All supplies are included, but you can bring your own horse hair if you choose.

Not everyone is so crafty or has the time, so I create horse hair earrings and bracelets for others, as well. Head over to the Horse Hair Jewelry page to find out more.

Out Of Our Hands is sponsoring a new class in July: Horse Hair Earrings!

As you saw in a previous post, we had a great time learning how to make porcupine quill earrings. You get to see what goes into creating something by hand, plus you go home with a new piece of jewelry.

Here are the details:

Horse Hair Earring Class

Sunday, July 13 from noon to 2 p.m.

at Out Of Our Hands, Emmaus, PA

Class Fee: $45

Please contact me or Out of Our Hands at 610-965-4806 to register.

While we’re on the subject of horse hair, click out the Horse Hair Jewelry tab along the top of the page. I finally added the horse hair earrings to the page so they are available for custom ordering.

Also notice the changes in the product descriptions. Each product is named after a horse I’ve known during my life. In the future I hope to include photos of each of these horses, but given some of them are steeds I met 20-some years ago, I have to do some digging to do.

Remember the days of film cameras? Push the button, advance the film BY HAND. Then wait ages, no eons for the film to get developed and sent back to you in the mail (the anticipation alone, made me stare down the mailbox for days). Then, the big question: are the photos good…no heads cut off or blurriness.

Yup, those were the days before digital cameras and many of my four-legged friends were captured this way. So after I wade through that huge box, I hope to add those critters to the site.

In the meantime, enjoy your summer. I know I am!

I’ve added some new items to my Etsy shop and not just any items, but my two favorite pieces I have in stock right now.

First up are these horse hair earrings above. I love the earrings. The hammered bead cone on top of the horse hair and garnet just makes these look so classy. Hopefully I can get some more of these bead cones and add them to most of my horse hair earrings.

Often I use a variety of bead to finish off the earrings, which give the earrings a rustic feel, like those at right. But these shiny hammer sterling tops really kick it up a notch, as Emeril would say, and give it the flash and sophistication needed for a more classic style.

The other reason I love these: the photo actually captures the color of the garnet drops. I really need to invest in an SLR camera and macro lens. Not in the budget today, so I need to figure out the intricacies of my current camera, and I’m not exactly an ace. I snap lots of photos and hope for the best. The stars aligned, or maybe the lighting was just right, when I took that picture.

Next up is this pair of quilled earrings.

I love these because they are my second “break out” piece (I’ll be posting my first break out piece later this week). By break out piece I mean I finally made the craft my own and did my own thing.

Porcupine quillwork is a very old art and much of what is know about it was collected by a Smithsonian scientist in the early 1900s.By the time he talked with quillworkers who’d learned their craft from generations of other quillworkers this technique was falling out of favor among most Native American Indians. There isn’t much information on quillwork, and it makes you wonder how much of craft was lost along the way.

I’m not of Native American descent (at least not that I know of) and had no one to teach me the techniques, so for years I’ve been teaching myself porcupine quillwork by reading books, looking a museum pieces and using classic trial and error. The designs and techniques I’ve done up until recently have been literally by the book, or the way people interpreted the creation of quillwork, so I could learn the techniques. With these earrings I decided to do a different shape with the quills and the leather. An artist was born.

This was reinforced yesterday while listening to a CraftCast podcast interviewing Thomas Mann. Imitation is how we learn, he said, and once you move beyond the imitation you can become your own artist. Mann goes on to explain how imitation as learning manifests itself at craft show where in a certain time period all the work looks similar. (An interesting note for you locals: Thomas Mann embarked on his art-laden path at 8 years old when he began attending the Baum School of Art in Allentown.) The podcast is worth a listen, as are most of Alison Lee’s CraftCast podcasts.

I’ll keep you updated as I add more pieces to my shop in the next few days.

In the meantime, I took a little fieldtrip into my beadbox to make a few gifts for Mother’s Day and birthdays. Here are the results:

Hematite and porcelain bead necklace with…

…matching earrings.

A pair of bead and pearl earrings.

My friend picked out the red porcelain beads and pink cylinders with black polka dots and I made them into earrings for her. Hope she likes them.

It’s been a busy week here at Red-Tail Designs HQ.

I finished the bracelet for my customer in Kentucky. As you can see above, it turned out looking more black than gray. I sent it out last week and by now she should be enjoying a remembrance of her horse. The 14 karat gold clasp and beads give it a bit of a glow.

Also finished up a project for a neighbor who wanted me to create birthstone babies that matched the ones she already had. The store where she’d purchased the first 4 charms had gone out of business. With a growing brood of grandchildren, she wanted to add two more to her collection and turn her pin into a necklace.

Coffee cuffs were also on the menu this week. I experimented with some new “boy fabrics” (as I like to call them) and then restocked the local coffee shop, Cosmic Cup Coffee Co. It’s tough to find interesting fabrics for men. There’s some cute stuff for boys and sports fabrics are often a hit with men, although so far this year I can’t find any of the baseball team fabrics in cotton. I wanted to make a Mets cuff for my husband, but all I can find is fleece. Beyond sports themes, it’s often hard to find fabrics that are expressive of men that aren’t so uptight.

Skull and crossbones is a good solution. The owner of the Cosmic Cup liked his personal cuff I made for him.

He’s a supported of the subversive culture who gets a kick out of pirates.

This little dog in the tea cup also cracks me up.

I was a little more successful in finding fabrics for a new baby boy. He doesn’t seem like the pirate type, so I stuck with the sports theme.

I even made a bib that matches the coffee cuff I made for his mom. She can turn the roses inside out to reveal the same fabric as the bib. I’ve been working on putting a completely different type of fabric on the inside of the cuffs so you can two looks for the price of one.

All of these projects came in the midst of planning a princess birthday party for my now 5-year-old. I had the partygoers make regular Barbie dresses into princess-wear for their Barbies. With jewels, fabric and glitter glue at their disposal, the little princesses proceeded to load the dresses mostly with glitter. When I later found glitter glue on the toilet seat, I declared the party a success.

Just when I thought I’d catch a break from the all the parties, I realized I need presents for two parties coming up this weekend.

My latest gift for kids is an artist book with space for tablet, colored pencils and stickers.

I have the fabrics cut, but still have to sew. Pretty easy until I get to sewing the pocket for the colored pencils. That takes a little time.

Check out this nifty horse bracelet I ordered recently. I can wait to experiment with it! I plan to braid or hitch horse hair around the wire between the two heads (FYI: braiding and hitching are two different types of weaving). It should look very cool when it’s done. I’ll keep you posted.

But before I can start on a new project, though, I need to finish a custom piece for a woman in Kentucky who is very patiently waiting. She sent me the hair at right from her horse who died a while ago.

What I find interesting about working with horse hair is the range of colors or, in this case, lack of colors. Take gray, for instance, which is what you’d probably say this hair is. Gray doesn’t seem to exist in horses (and probably people, too). There are black strands and white strands and when you put them together they look gray. Check out gray-haired people and see if it’s true.

Okay, maybe that’s only interesting to me, but it makes a huge difference when I braid the hair. Before I weave the bracelet, I have to make pulls, which are groupings of 12 to 20 individual hairs that are twisted together to make a single strand. It’s similar to spinning wool into yarn so you can knit it. If I put all the white hairs in some pulls and all the black hairs in other pulls, when I braided the whole thing, it would look striped. To get the gray effect, I have to put both colors in each pull.

These are my pulls before I braid them together.

Even though I’ve done this many times, I still don’t really know what it’ll look like until the end. I heard a podcast the other day on Craft Sanity from a printer who said the same thing. After she carves her block, she thinks about what it will look like, but once she runs it through the press visuals she hadn’t expected pop out and others fade into the background. As soon as I’m done I’ll post a picture of the completed bracelet.

A few weeks back I created a custom bracelet with horse hair that was very dark at one end, red in middle and blonde at the other. It’s a bit difficult to see the variation in the photo at right, but you get the idea. I had no clue what that was going to look like in the end. In creating pulls I count out the same number of hairs each time. Maybe that’s a waste of time, but it makes the pulls consistent, which makes a better braid. The photo below shows the hairs tied together before I twist them into a pull. To keep the diameter consistent from one end to the other, I flip half the hairs around before making the pulls. Just like people hair, horse hair is thick at the scalp and becomes every so slightly thinner by the time it reaches the tip of the hair. So in flipping the hairs around with the red-blonde horse, I got both colors mixed in the bracelet. In the end, it looked red because most of the blonde color was overwhelmed by the red, as you can see in the photo below. Still, it looked pretty cool in the end and the horse owner was happy. Which is what really counts.