To ring in the New Year and star the month of January off right, I wanted to craft some tsumami-zaiku pieces in winter and new year motifs. This week I’m bringing the birds; specifically, dancing cranes. I’ve crafted many cranes, but this time I decided to make them all white and instead of using red silk to create the red crest element, I used a tear drop shaped red rhinestone. These cranes are both “dancing,” and are meant to be worn vertically instead of horizontally – although they look pretty good positioned either way.

I’ve also been wanting to expand my range of brooches – so both of these cranes are brooches. I made some crane obidomes last year, but obidomes unfortunately don’t play a large part in the average Saskatchewanian person’s wardrobe. I’m still hopeful that the obidomes will eventually find the right homes, but until then I’ll be sticking with brooches and lapel pins.

I have a tendency to craft things in groupings, so now that I’ve finished some cranes I have an urge to make more birds – specifically a ho-ou, or phoenix. It’s been a long time since I made one of those and they are one of my very favorite motifs.

Aside from working on these cranes, I also spent the past several months plugging away at something really close to my heart – taking the official basic, intermediate and advanced tsumami-zaiku courses offered by the International Tsumami-zaiku association. I was lucky enough to receive a grant from SK Arts to pursue this goal, and although my original timeline got delayed by my illness, I did finally complete the course work. Hooray!

Because I have been dedicating most of my time and energy to this pursuit, I haven’t shared much of this journey on my blog or social media – but that’s going to change this year. I’ll soon be posting all the new work I’ve completed, and making some of it available for purchase in the shop.

Speaking of social media posting, I also made a little video showing part of the process for making this piece. It’s available to watch now on my Youtube channel. If you’d like to learn a bit more about how these pieces were made, I hope you’ll check it out. I also little videos about travel, shopping, fashion and so on if you’re interested.

I definitely need to say a big “Thank you!” to my amazing husband, friends, and family for supporting and believing in me, every lovely person who reads this blog or stops by my table at shows, as well as SK Arts and Creative Saskatchewan whose grants have made the certification course and production of new collections of work possible. Without these people and organizations, I wouldn’t be here sharing my craft with the world.

If you’d like to have a piece of my work, this will be part of my end of month product drop! 🙂 Keep an eye on this page or follow my Instagram for more crafty chill updates.