Winter’s Come Early to the Coast
Fall’s here, winter’s comin’, and we are gearing up for our favorite seasons at Alone Star with a couple of additions to the collection. Lisa and I both love the cooler temperatures, fall colors, the snow, icicles, even the dicey stuff like sleet and ice–mainly because in our part of Texas the divide between summer-to-fall and winter is so half-hearted, the lackluster seems to spill over into winter and we end up with a season that doesn’t really know it’s supposed to be cold. Especially in this coastal region you just have to reminisce, and you can if you have good kid memories like we do. Those of foot-long icicles hanging from the eaves when we lived near Ft. Worth, or when snow came there one winter with 2-foot drifts in the front ditch! Man, we haven’t seen snow like that since then: moving to Austin was the end of that. I remember one winter in the Cap’tol, though, when there was an ice storm that moved through. I got up with the sun that day to see the uncommon site of every last twig on every tree branch covered with a crystal clear layer of ice. I’d never seen such a crystalline world as that, with the sun making all the scenes sparkle. That reminds me–have you seen our Snow Dreams bracelet and earrings?While a few years ago the Houston area got, as judged by all, a quality snow storm, since then all we can do is wish for more. We have two new pieces that reflect the current and coming season, and the most recent is a pair of earrings Lisa made just today, seen in the photo above. She calls them Sleeting Earrings and you can read her description of them on the site. They are made with Argentium sterling silver wire. This is a newly developed, improved sterling–improved I say because it resists tarnish to a high degree, a most desirable quality. The magic ingredient is germanium; Lisa provides a link with the earrings’ description for further education on the subject. One thing I like about Argentium is clearly seen in the photo: it makes great-looking ball-end wires. Sterling silver wire balls up surely enough, but most of the time irregularly, with wretched little pits, not perfectly round like in these earrings. It’s usually a crap shoot for me trying to make nice round bulbs with regular sterling wire, but it looks like Lisa had no trouble t’all using the Argentium. These are some heap gorgeous earrings, and I love the way she dropped a couple of the wires significantly lower than the rest–a very nice touch indeed.
We are slowly transitioning to Argentium. It should be a great fit with PMC, which is very slow to show tarnish, too.
The Fall Triangle Necklace is the other new seasonal piece to which I refer above, and you can see it on the home page. It’s the same necklace as the Spring Triangle, new name for the old Flower Patch necklace I worried over some earlier time in this blog journey. The whole thing was revamped, renamed and reconceptualized, then pushed to a reflect an additional season. Now I am thinking of a winter version, but finding the time to put that together before the Bazaar would be like an early Christmas present itself! Oh, well, even if winter is vague in these parts, it is still winter that lasts through February, and of course, there’s that miracle of modern living the world wide web, which brings Winter & Those Living in It to us all year round.
One Comment
Shauna
Lisa said she’s been wearing these earrings tonight, and when she shakes her head, they click like the sound of sleet! A visual and auditory experience! I am also a bit peeved with the format of the blog post. I tried several times to put a space before the line about transitioning to Argentium, and then before the last paragraph, but the space wouldn’t ‘take’. It’s irritating because I want the posts to look perfect.