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.