happy dreams darkly bright

I have been experimenting again.(imagine me ringing my hands together and laughing like a mad man when you read that last line) My Wordless Wednesday post showed a little sneak peek photo of this new resin bottle cap design. Did you see it? LOL, not likely. It seems my resin has turned and gone all cloudy and yellow. Oh well, it was old. I had hoped that it would clear when it hardened, but alas, it is still a wee bit cloudy. Unlike this photo huh? LOL. We had a rare afternoon of sun yesterday that was begging to be photographed.

I am kinda excited about these new bottle caps. You might remember these caps using up lots of wirey scraps and made into pendants. I have been thinking for a while now that I wanted to find a way to set some of my mixed media paintings into small bezels, set with resin, and made into cool components. As I was making these though, I couldn't quite get the look I was going for with the tiny paintings/drawings, so I let my mind wander and pulled out that tattered copy of Shakespeare sonnets I have been using for my latest series of paintings. I opened to a page and picked a word. Suddenly, all sorts of words were jumping out at me.

There are many times when I see "inspirational" things with words or phrases and I wonder what *I* would say given the opportunity. Most of the time I can't think of a thing that hasn't already been said. The other day was different. The sentiments just seemed to roll out. I love this phrase that jumped out to me "happy dreams darkly bright". It isn't anything Shakespeare said, these were words from different sentences on different pages. I like that... I really like that.

The other phrases that are in the few caps I made are "loved clearly", "dream that it may be", "treasure beauty in love", and "nimble tears for sweet ♥". Yeah, for some reason, "love" comes up a lot in a book of sonnets... go figure. LOL.

Anyway, fresh resin is on its way to my studio. I plan to make more of these (I gotta lotta caps in my studio!) I would love to hear your thoughts though. Should I be making these into funky mixed media jewelry pieces for y'all or do you want the components to play with yourselves in your own jewelry designs? If I make them for you to use, do ya like one loop to connect to (like a pendant) or two (like in this bracelet)? An inquiring mind wants to know.