Thing The Second: Collaboration with the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours

At Readercon earlier this month, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, and while sitting in the audience at their concert, I found myself making a necklace inspired by some of the songs from their “Ballads From A Distant Star” project, which reworks traditional folksongs to be about a mining colony in space. I’m not doing it justice at all because it’s almost 1am and I should be asleep, but it’s awesome.

Afterwards, I showed Claire and Amal and Caitlyn the necklace and told them a bit about how I used to be a folksinger and once aspired to be a song collector/folklorist (before I realized that particular career pays even worse than being an artist, poet, or musician…) and the next thing I knew we were exchanging contact information and talking about what beads went to what song lyrics and and and and.

(This is how it always starts. One minute I’m quietly sitting in a corner working, the next I find myself up to my eyebrows in some kind of interstitial collaboration. Art is tricksy, y'all. It attacks when you’re not looking.)

AND THEN. Today we were emailing back and forth about it, because the beads had been talking to me, and Amal suggested that perhaps if I could get the first few pieces from the collection up on the website we could do a bit of cross-promotion for the An Alphabet of Embers Kickstarter at the same time, since one of the stretch goals on that project is a new song from the BACT! Which I delightedly agreed was a most excellent idea, and when I saw that the Kickstarter only needed a little nudge to hit that particular stretch goal, I decided that the first $60 of sales from pieces in the Ballads From A Distant Star project would be earmarked to support An Alphabet of Embers, in the name of art supporting other art supporting other art, and I got out my credit card and preemptively increased my pledge accordingly, because that’s what credit cards are for sometimes.

(And then I got to talking to Rose about cross-promotion and phoenix pendants, and, well, this is what I mean about art being tricksy and sneaking up on people.)

Anyway. Where was I? Right, it’s 1 am, I’m supposed to be in bed. Here, have a photo:

The necklace is the piece that started it all, and the other beads are things that have demanded to be made into jewelry about songs and stories about abducted miners in space. There’s tektites, and lodestones, and pyrite, and some labradorite, and titanium-coated druzy quartz, and tiny stars, and lampwork glass that looks like planets, and leaves, and I need to go shopping for meteorites because really, how can I NOT go shopping for meteorites now?

Going to bed now. But this is a thing that is happening, and I hope to have the first few pieces up on the website by this weekend, seeing as how I’ve already spent some of that money before I’ve even made it.