Pittsburgh’s South Side Sally

Yes, this is a self promotion.  I have decided that I am a jewelry artist.  Well at least I have achieved the following accomplishments:  lapidary, including , beading,  free form lapidary, cutting faceted stones.  I have worked with metalsmithing for seven years, tried pmc,  lost wax casting,  pearl knotting,  wire is my favorite media.  So I have acquired a reasonable number of skill sets with regard to jewelry.  Now I need to develop the artistic side:  drawing designs would be another thing I need  to develop  with a more understanding of color, light and architecture of design.

Well here is my segue to South Side Memories.

I love rocks a lot of different kinds.  I brought them home from various places like concrete gravel mixtures, the Basin, the Quarry limestone, calcite…but back then I didn’t know what they were called.  I even loved to go to the Basin and just stare at the hillside, cracks in the rocks wondering if there was something valuable inside.  Maybe arrowheads, fossils, or something.  I had heard somewhere when I was little that a diamond was made up of carbon under pressure.  So I thought if I took a piece of coal and put it under some heavy rocks it would turn into a diamond maybe in a month or so.  Of course I was little and my sense of time didn’t match mother nature’s geological clock for the formation of a diamond.  Oh well, now I am just like everyone else and am lucky, if I have something in a ring even totally less than a half a carat.  Oh the memories and fantasies of childhood.

Sara and I had coffee at the Beehive Cafe on the South Side South 14th and Carson.  The place is very electic.  I remember when this was Lando’s Rexall Drug Store.  Lando’s was there for what seemed like forever.  I remember going down to the drugstore on my bicycle to get stuff for my mom.  Back then you could park your bike on the sidewalk and leave it there.  No one would bother it.  I’m not sure of today.  I don’t think I would leave my bike outside a store today.