Just a little jewelry in July

I'm a bit of a bead whore and jewelry junkie and I'm also very big on repurposing things. My parents were frugal folk and it did not skip a generation.

Based on my projects at Teradata/NCR, it had to have been at least 5 or 6 years ago when the hardware guys I was working with did a redesign/rethink of a honking huge circuit board and, as a result, scrapped a whole slew of heat sinks.

On the day the heat sinks were about to hit the dumpster, I was in the lab talking with the engineers who were gathering up the doomed. I immediately saw potential in these little hotties for either jewelry, sculpture or some other art project so I adopted a few.

As is the usual case, the adoptees went into the project room to rub elbows with some of the other oddments and wait for their turn at the front of the inspiration & project queue.

One thing and another, lay off, connecting with colleagues, chats with local artists (dangers of living near Spanish Village), some $ store and Industrial Liquidators finds and front of the queue they came.

So what do you get when you mix heat sinks, liquid gold leaf, cheap $ store nail varnish, a bit of Industrial Liquidators' brass wire, niobium ear wires and my creative vision?

Earrings that are getting me major compliments.

These are actually second generation as the first ones I painted out with a great green that just would not/could not work with normal ear wires and put me back on the niobium track.

Most of the heat sinks are base black but some are metallic. I'm trying to work for now with the black and saving the metallics for different wire wrap treatments.

For jewelry, the black poses a bit of a problem if you're trying to get good surface colour coverage and not have a jarring ticky-tacky (trash to treasure never really comes off as more than trashy IMO).

They have a nice channel that lets you hide the wire you're using to create the loop that will connect up to the ear wire or other finding. That channel also allows for the interesting interlocking quality that first drew me to them and thought they might do well as sculpture in one form or another.

I've wired up and worn the original vision green ones and I have a number of other variations either in process or planned. Some for me, some so not.