Studio Musings

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Storytelling - Message(s) in a Bottle

Since I'm totally drawn to the ocean in my design themes, I've decided to play with the idea of the Message in a Bottle for next month's freeform peyote Found Objects Challenge.

First I had to find a bottle.  I scrounged up three.  The dark brown one came from Joe's grandmother's house and almost won the coin toss until he pointed out that you wouldn't be able to easily see that there were messages inside. 

On to the next: the Pyrat is a great shape, and it's RUM, but the bottle is ungodly heavy (heavy means more likely to damage any beads underneath).  And it's big!  While I'm not expecting to completely finish the piece before the reveal, I'd like to get somewhere close.

Which led me back to the third bottle in my photo.    Way back when, I came up with this grand idea of creating a six-pack of beaded Coke bottles.  Each with their own theme.  For the past several years, I've had exactly one and a half bottles complete.  This would nearly double my total!  Even better - You could definitely see a message through the clear glass, or messages, plural.....

So here's where you come in:

I want my bottle to be crammed full of messages.  Message on top of message on top of message.  Since I like making up stories, I'm sure I can come up with quite a few.  But wouldn't it be more fun if I weren't the only one?  Say there was a whole community of castaways and lost souls, with only one bottle between the lot of them - would they fight over the bottle, or decide it was community property and use it as the local post office before throwing it into the sea? 

I'm inviting you to send me messages for my bottle.  You can comment to this blog post below, or you can email (skunkhillstudio at yahoo dot com) me directly.  Funny, sad, witty, a wish, thought-provoking rambles, a story message from your imagination or from real life - anything but crudities will go in. 

Send me Messages for my Bottle - Please!

I love the little reverse on the theme, too.

Thank you for becoming a part of my latest project!


Oh, and for those of you who follow my Facebook page, the round, beaded disc I posted there yesterday is the base for my beaded bottle.  It comes from a suggestion by David Chatt.  From what I remember, he noted that a single layer of seed beads underneath a fully beaded bottle is very fragile - just the weight of the glass and the beads above can be enough to damage them.  As an alternative, he suggested using cubic right angle weave to provide a sturdier base, since it's three sandwiched layers of beadweaving.  So that's what it is: cubic right angle weave in the round.  Now it's time to start working with freeform peyote. 

4 comments:

  1. "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see" ~Edgar Degas~

    And you are so good at making others see......

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  2. my daughter will be thrilled to see what that disc is for. she was poking her head over my shoulder when i was cruising facebook the other day. when we came to your disc, she said, "i don't know what THAT is, but i LIKE it!"
    message in a bottle.....will have to ponder that a bit.

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  3. My message would be to my son Michael. He is in heaven and I'm sure he is looking down on me and our family every day.
    Michael, I wish you could have gotten to know all your nieces and nephews, you loved babies so much we have a couple you would have just fallen head over heels in love with. Zander, whom you got to hold a couple of months before you died, is 6 now and in school. You even have a great-nephew. Little Benjamin, who is 2. We miss you terribly but we know you are in a much better place. Love you forever, Mom.

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    ReplyDelete