The Brass Caliper
Lori Embree
Owner / Artist
Rigby, Idaho
www.thebrasscaliper.com
thebrasscaliper@gmail.com
September 2017 Brass Packs - Places & People
Enclosed is your September 2017 Brass Pack based on the Places & People theme. We are fortunate enough to have guest artists Jennifer Evans and Jerusha Hawkins as guest artists contributing. You’ve got to check out their stuff, they are fantastic. This month they have sent you “The Shire’s Beard Balm.” It smells DIVINE, and almost makes me wish I had a beard. I am 50, and close to menopause, so I may get my wish. I hope you held on to the leg of September and summer like I did. I love summer. I do not want it to end. But I’m afraid fall is among us. I know this because I have seen our hometown HomeComing Parade. Football season. I don’t know about you, but while I do love football, my idea of fun is NOT freezing my buns off at a football game. Living in Idaho means exactly that. I go to the homecoming game (we lost), and that’s about it. I don’t live in the town I grew up in, but close. My hometown’s mascot was the Cougars, and every homecoming, we would play the Firth Cougars. Yep--Cougars v. Cougars. Our homecoming floats were interesting. Go Cougars! Kill those Cougars! Confusing stuff. Anyway.
Your piece this month is inspired by a place and a person that perhaps normally you would never think about in a million years. I know I wouldn’t. It’s me and my stomping grounds. If you are like me, you HATE talking about yourself, but where you grew up….you could go on forever. But I promise I won’t on either account. You’ve already heard all you’re going to hear about my hometown this month, and the rest is kind of a bizarre story.
For as long as I can remember, I have loved watches & clocks. I was Steampunk before I knew it was Steampunk. But here’s the rub. I can’t wear watches, nor can I be around watches or clocks in close proximity for very long. Not because of the metals (even though I have sensitive skin, I have found a product that fixes that). It’s because there is something about me that makes them quit. I run down the batteries, stop the mechanisms that make them run, it is the weirdest thing. I am a mutant, and this (I suppose) is my superpower. That doesn’t stop me from buying watches, or filling my life with clocks (last count 47 in my house), it just means that none of them tell the correct time more than twice a day, and that my dreams of being a clock and watchmaker probably aren’t going to pan out. The batteries on my cell phones are always the first to die. I don’t know why and my doctor thinks I’m crazy (he is correct on that). My husband got a defibrillator in his chest a couple years back that has a battery, and I obsess about running it down. Every time it gets checked I ask the technician if the battery is ok and he looks at me like I’ve grown two heads.
So what does that have to do with your pieces this month? Well, since I can’t wear the watches I’ve been collecting since junior high school, I decided to take them apart and use them in my jewelry. Your pieces this month are from my own personal collection, circa probably somewhere between 1973 - 1985, and they really did try to work poor things! I feel better that they are now being repurposed for art instead of sitting in shoe boxes at the back of my closet. I put them in transparent pieces because I felt like they needed to be seen, since they can’t be used for their original purpose.
So what are your funny little quirks and superpowers? Or am I the only mutant in the room? I would love to hear your stories! (www.facebook.com/thebrasscaliper).
Next month: OH! The Horror! As always, thank you for sharing the journey,
Lori Embree, Owner/Artist/Energy Sucker Mutant.
The Brass Caliper
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