Resin from Nature! Helping the Bees & Butterflies

So I’ve been watching the BBC programme Bees, Butterflies & Blooms and how it is believed the decline in our wild flowers is causing the decline in out pollinating insects.  Personally I love wild flowers and the fact my less than tidy garden allows wild flowers to grow in the garden is just perfect, well in my considered opinion!

So today I read about a new sort of resin made from a natural ingredient base (ecopoxycraftresin) including beans & peanuts – makes it sound like a curry! It is a wonderful step forward in making resin jewellery as it is a move towards a renewable source of resin even if it does sound a bit like a recipe for tonight’s tea. Plus with these being plant material bases it just means we’re going to have to help those pollinating insects by encouraging wild flowers for them!

The Dog Ate my Homework, Oops no My Phone Charger!

Some day’s life just takes you back to the way things used to be, well this week it was the dog that took me back by chewing my phone charger into some very small unusable and un-saveable bits.  Don’t you just love them!!  At this stage I think I named him well, Conan as in the destroyer because he did just love to chew as a puppy, and I have my suspicions about who finished the almonds too, who ever heard of a dog with a thing for nuts?

But I digress!! So without a phone the last 3 days it’s reminded me how relaxing it can be to have your own space and time in which people can’t get hold of you.   Working quietly away in my workshop undisturbed all day has been wonderful, and now I plan to leave my phone anywhere but in the workshop when I really want to get down to some serious making and designing, I’ll just check my phone in my tea breaks if I remember ;-)  I’d say I’m sorry for all the missed calls but I won’t be. I’m just adopting the philosophy of the area I live in, I’ll get to it directly.

Wood for the Trees – reduce, reuse, recycle

These days we’re all encouraged to reduce, reuse, recycle; in fact you could almost say that’s becoming a mantra for us all to live by.  I’ve just seen a huge pile of wood being incinerated instead of being used as fire wood to warm someone’s home at this chilly time of year. So in this age of increasing recycling why then do people forget about the wood for the trees? 

It brings home to me just how important recycling is and not least of all us artists.   It’s great that we can now get some fair trade beads & stones, recycle gold, but so much is still missing like recycled silver is so hard to find unless you make your own, and should you really be melting down your grandmother’s best silver goblet to turn it into jewellery, I suspect her answer’s no!

So next I’m off to the recycling yard to find some scrap metal to turn into something wonderful in my bid to save the planet, and not get myself in trouble by melting down the family silver.