laurieopal

Life is finally feeling back to normal. I've caught up on the metal work from Worldcon that was delayed by the dog bite taking longer then I expected to heal. (I am mostly fine now.) And the very last package goes out on Monday. Thank you everyone for your patience!

The pendant below was mostly done in August before the dog bite and I was only able to finish it very recently. The "stone" in the pendant is art glass formed using the battuto technique. It was made by the artist Amy West who's gallery is in Venice..

Battuto, an Italian word that means "struck" or "beaten," refers to a cold working technique in which glass is cut or ground into to create depressions or small facets in the surface of the glass. The effect, which is not unlike distressed furniture or hammered iron, is achieved by grinding the glass to produce numerous small, irregularly shaped crevices adjacent and parallel to each other over the surface of the glass.

The surface work is subtle and very difficult to photograph. But I do think the image gives some sense of the glass. The design was made to reflect the qualities of the glass and at the same time to work with "edges" in highly contrasting ways. The silver itself has "facets of varying sizes.