She'll then dip into her jars of Found Objects...discarded artifacts unwanted by others but precious to her. Rhinestone pins with a stone or two missing, trims from frayed garments last worn long ago, metal clippings from rusty tin boxes, buttons with their threads still intact. It is these things she loves to play with...to give a home to.

Perhaps the most desired bit of her collage creations is the addition of text. She has a way of putting words with images and often finds the "caption" for a photo just popping into her head. The quotes and sayings in her artwork are sometimes silly, sometimes sentimental, and sometimes don't make sense. This is because many of the sayings are taken directly from the pages of antique books...verbatim...yet completely out of context. Hours upon hours are spent reading through time-worn books, searching for a sentence that may just jump out of no-where. Every once in a while she comes across a book whose story is so intriguing she wanted to read more and would flip back to the beginning of the book, only to discover missing words, sentences, paragraphs, and even whole pages that she had clipped out herself.

No matter what, all of these little works of art are meant to be shared...so each is converted to a high-resolution image printed with archival inks (a life span of 100 years under glass) on professional artists' paper and sandwiched between glass. Each is then framed with very high silver content lead-free solder which Sally Jean solders herself. All this is done with the hopes that when seen, worn, and read by others, bursts of "THIS IS SO ME!" or "I FEEL THIS WAY TOO!" are shouted. (Of course, there must be someone else who drinks Diet Coke for breakfast or loves her pussycat a bit too much).

Making little collages into jewelry is like wearing your heart on your sleeve...only better...it's wearing your sentiments around your neck. Eye candy for the soul...

2005
Paula Abdul Tiara
American Idol Extreme Makeover