Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Bangles, Beads, Bugs and Buddies
















Finally, the end of a long, long week and the beginning of a new one. Last week was spent nursing sick kids and mourning the death of good Christian man who died much too soon. The kids are feeling better now, the hubby has gotten over his share of the bug and my buddy has been laid to rest, but the sadness lingers.

To help keep the sadness at bay, I joined in a bracelet challenge -- a cuff challenge to be specific. Since I don't wear bracelets much and NEVER wear cuffs, the challenge is an interesting one. We are all working from the same photo of a cuff made by a friend and doing a similar cuff in our own style. Very interesting and quite tough, actually. One friend works in colored wire and is making a bright, happy colored cuff, the other is working in earth tones and I am working, as usual, in two-tones -- gold and silver.

The other project I worked on was based on some lovely mini tapestries one of the local artists here does -- her name is Roberta Barnes and she does these teeny tiny landscape tapestries, and teeny tiny landscape paintings on ceramics. They are breathtaking. I decided I could do something similar, but using the landscape cabochons I have already been incorporating into my jewelry. So, now I am painting with seed beads! My first one was rather rough, as I was flying blind, but since then I have read up a bit on seed beads and hopefully the second one will be much improved. I really like the first one and it is quite a conversation starter. I also plan to use my miniature colored pencil paintings as the focal point of some of these pendants -- which will be lots of fun!

We also got some new "critters" for the acreage -- kitties! We have a mouse problem in the machine shed (including one that crawled up in the pickup's air conditioning shroud and died --peeyew), so a friend gave us some kittens. I went after two -- one for each kid -- but came home with four! Cute little guys though and one has totally adopted me. We now have one black kitten, one yellow kitten and two calico kittens. They are from three different litters, so all at different stages. The calicos are the youngest and the yellow one is the oldest.

Time to feed the calf and the kittens, then off to work at the art gallery for the day. Guess I will take my newest bead painting project with me to work on.

Happy creating!