My Honeys

Yesterday afternoon as my husband and I were instant messaging back/forth on Yahoo, he typed the most romantic thing. He told me we were meant to be together.

Now granted, it was after we had been discussing what to have for dinner and we simultaneously suggested grilled cheese samiches and soup. But still. He said it. He meant it. And I'll take it. I love this man more than anything!

On another note, I have been completely swamped with getting my training completed in case our union goes on strike and I get shipped off to Durant, Oklahoma. Swamped equates to 12 hour days in front of the computer learning about test sets, ground faults, dial tone generation, pole climbing, aerial lift trucks and 37 other courses. Yes, I really have completed 42 courses. I have 8 more to go and they will likely take another 50 hours of my time. Sadly, this means no torch time for me. And really, not any blogging time either.

But I was going mad with training and I needed (yes, NEEDED) to take this five minute break and share with everyone about my wonderful husband.

South Bend, IN artist - Beatrice Studio

I bought this clutch from Beatrice Studio at the end of last week and it arrived on Monday while I was in Dallas for training with work. While Anna's photographs are awesome (note-to-self, find out what she uses for lighting), the purse is even better in person! I was so excited to get home after being gone three days to find this waiting for me. Her packaging was great (it arrived like a birthday present wrapped in a green bow & tissue paper), but the colors of the fabric and her workmanship are most excellent!!! The big square button is too cool :)



Again, love her photography. Digging the button used with these green zebra stripes.

And her stash of uber-cool fabrics. LOVE the bright, cheery colors! I know where I'll be getting some of my Christmas shopping completed this year for fam/best friends!

You can buy Anna's great items in her Etsy shop at www.beatricestudio.etsy.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/beatricestudio. Beatrice Studio also keeps her blog current at http://beatricestudio.wordpress.com.

Or her number one location with the easiest url to remember at www.beatricestudio.com.

New bead pics

Too tired to write much, but wanted to share pics before I go to bed so I can say I accomplished something tonight ;)

Here is a new CiM color I just bought recently called Plum. Love this purple as it is nothing like any other shade I have worked with...not really lavender or violet or purple....more plum. It is a bit of a milky transparent. Not exactly opaque, but definitely not a transparent, either.


Now start the pics of beads with Taxco Silver Turquoise. In rod form, it is a transparent teal/blue. Put it on an opaque which reacts well to metals (like ivory & a handful of other colors) and it turns into a bit of an opaque itself.


LOVE the silver outline followed by a black outline touching the yellow glass in these beads. It does the same on the ivory, but seems more pronounced to me on the yellow....


And here we have the Taxco Silver Turquoise on opaque turquoise beads (it remains a transparent), on Uranium Yellow (where it turns a transparent green) and in a twisty with ivory around a clear bead (where it looks almost completely black). All of these beads were etched. I think the twisty on clear is my favorite because the clear glass appears more grey/silver once etched.

New listings

I got my new photo tent/cube & put it to good use today. Not so thrilled with the lights that came with it that were supposed to be oh-so-super.

But the tent worked great when I took it out to my deck for mid-day photography session over my lunch hour today.


I got all of these listed in my Etsy shop tonight before 24 started! :)

Let me know what you think of the photography and/or the beads.

Toggle Clasps & Big Hole Mandrels

These are the beads/clasps I made in Amy's Toggle Clasp class last Monday in Brea, California. We used 5/8ths mandrels to make the ring part of the clasp. I didn't melt the dots in all the way on the purple or green for a more funky finish.
For the toggle/bar part of the clasp, we either cut rods into small sections & melted them to small spacer beads or we heated them to bend into V's and attached those to small spacers. My favorite is the shape of the V that I made with the red glass.


Here is a pic of the big hole beads on the mandrel, although I used three separate mandrels to make them....one for each bead. These beads take up much more surface area on the mandrel and are often very difficult to remove after being annealed.

My secret for easily removing beads from mandrels is to cut up these Scotch-Brite pads into 2x4" rectangles to hold onto the beads and twist them back & forth while I hold the other end of a mandrel still with a pair of pliers. The beads twist off like a piece of cake (normally!).

California

It was a stressful trip, or rather a much dreaded event for the two weeks leading up to it. In my stomach, I knew I would not be returning home to my family. My flight was canceled last Sunday (as were all flights leaving Atlanta) when the Blizzard of 2009 hit us with 4-6 inches of snow before the afternoon had barely arrived. I arrived at John Wayne airport in Orange County on Monday morning after catching the first non-stop out of ATL.

Training ended early and I found that Amy was instructing a class in a nearby town only 20 miles away. We had previously agreed to meet for coffee one afternoon, but finding out about her class and that it had an opening was an unexpected thrill. I have admired her work ever since I started up my Etsy shop a year ago and have enjoyed exchanging tweets with her on Twitter. In her class, I learned how to make a toggle clasp out of glass. My efforts aren't that pretty, but then I was focusing more on technique than color combinations & decorations. I'll post pics tomorrow. Before I left, Amy gave me one of her signature droplet beads :)


When driving back to my hotel after the class, American Pie came on the radio singing to me that this would be the day that I die. A quick push of the seek button to the next radio station landed me in the middle of a rage on Revelations from a Christian radio station. Off went the radio and the hands gripped the 2 and 10 positions on my steering wheel for the next 30 minutes.


During the course of my training class, I learned how to use various test sets for finding troubles on phone/data lines in the field. I climbed down into a manhole and I raised myself 40 feet in the air on a bucket truck extension arm. The view of the San Bernardino mountains was awesome, although I didn't have my camera with me.


The highlights of the trip were taking Amy's class (was totally unprepared for any torch time!), hanging out with her for a coupla hours in Starbucks the next day, driving to San Clemente down the Coastal Hwy (all the above pics were taken on my drive to SC or on their pier), dinner with Level 3 friends of Todd's in San Clemente, training ending a day early and getting a 3 hour layover in Salt Lake City where my best friend from the 2nd grade picked me up & hung out with me over dessert. This was the first time I have seen Becky in 25 years. How fun to catch up face-to-face after so many years and now be moms.

So. Very. Thankful. To. Be. Home. Safe.

With my husband and kids. They are the absolute best things I have going on in my life!

Travel

No, I don't have any new bead pics to share. I'm sorry. I did make 40+ beads on Friday night. And I did make another 40+ beads yesterday. I even got all the beads from Friday night cleaned out and ready to photograph. The beads from yesterday are still on mandrels standing up on display on my kitchen window sill. I'll get the pics taken next weekend. When I get back home from California.

If only I had known that leaving the house at 10am today was a fruitless decision. Then I would have stayed home. Snuggled with the kids. Snuggled with my wonderful husband who offered to keep me company while I sat at the torch & melted glass the other night. And taken bead pics on the back porch while the sky was white with snow.


Instead, I stood in line at Hartsfield for four hours. FOUR HOURS, people! For just a few inches of snow that has all melted, but single-handedly destroyed the entire flight schedule at the Atlanta airport and canceled all flights for today. They changed me to a non-stop flight that leaves at 8:25am tomorrow. Which means I need to get up & leave before the crack of dawn. In fact, I'll need to be at the AIRPORT before the crack of dawn. So I can wait again because there will likely be ice somewhere in Georgia causing problems. Not necessarily at Hartsfield, but somewhere. They have already started closing schools in/around Atlanta. So when you think of me tomorrow, I'll just be waiting...