New Beads!

This weekend was so quiet for me.  The kids were gone from Saturday afternoon through Monday afternoon.  My honeys was up in Minnesota visiting his Mom.  It was just me and the hounds and the cats and the ferret and the hamster and two tanks of fish.

I spent Saturday and Sunday evenings on the torch, as well as much of Monday morning.  Here are the spoils from Sat/Sun.  The beads from Monday are soaking in the kitchen sink, but there are many more lentils waiting to be cleaned out.  It felt soooo good to sit down at the torch and create again.  Watching two months slide by without firing it up once was hard.  I don't like being that busy.

Besides torching, I cleaned out both fish tanks and moved one from the kitchen back to the girl child's room.  We'll see if she's grown up enough now to keep her hands out of the tank because her fish want to visit Owen's fish.  I gave a thorough cleaning to all four cat boxes.  That was exciting.  I framed and hung up pictures.  I saw Kung Fu Panda 2 with the kids and my Mom.  I took Little Horse to Petsmart to get out of the house.  I started reading a book suggested by a friend that is helping solidify a current course of action within our family.  And I thought about both of my grandfathers and how they served in World War II overseas and wondered about what they saw and experienced.  How they felt leaving their families behind as they fought to protect the freedoms of their country and others.  I stayed up way late and took advantage of being able to sleep in.  I enjoyed my freedom with no schedule and found myself eating breakfast at 2pm and dinner after 10pm. 

And.  I missed my honeys.

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend!  I can't believe it's almost Wednesday already.  This week is screaming by me.  I'm trying to get it in gear so I can do a shop update on Friday evening.

Family Expansion and New Eggs!

Last week I hinted that our family had expanded, which initiated a few emails from family and friends --> Are you pregnant?!  The answer to that is a big no as Todd seems to feel he's too old for more and we're done.  Sniff.

But.  We did get a new pet!  One of our Tae Kwon Do friends mentioned to Todd a few weeks ago that his neighbor had an old ferret in need of a better home.  Since Todd shared that with me, I considered that to be consent and promptly brought this boy home.  Meet Ernie.

It has been four years since we have had a ferret in the house.  Our last one was Sammy and she was 8 years old when she passed.  Todd and I vowed to wait until the kids were grown before we took in ferrets again because the passing is just so hard.  But this one needed a good home.  He was old and sick and not getting any attention.  Ernie was extremely underweight (to the point that I could easily see his ribs through his skin) and very dehydrated.  The vet visit last week confirmed adrenal disease (which I expected with his bald tail.  adrenal disease is very common with ferrets and we fought it with many of our other ferrets in years past), his dehydration was gone (yay!) and that he has neurological problems which are disabling him from walking normally (his back end gives out on him).  She said she didn't expect him to walk normally or be able to climb again.  I felt so defeated.

But last night, I found Ernie trying to climb.  He didn't make it into the hanging hammock just above his head.  But he tried and that made me happy.  And this morning, I heard him making noise and when I walked around to see him....he had climbed up to the first level in his cage.  Rock on, Ernie!

This weekend went extremely fast (I can't remember the last time we had a slow weekend, but maybe this coming Memorial Day weekend will be since the kids will be spending time with each of my parents Saturday - Monday).  We spent many hours cleaning up and straightening the house and doing laundry.  A karate festival was in there (complete with a dunk tank where they made sure that the kids got to dunk the instructors, even if their pitch wasn't strong enough to make it happen), a soccer banquet and a get together with friends (which included a walk down to the creek and a cookout).  I also squooshed in time to make 20 new eggs.  :)

I will be making more this week (I hope!) so I can have multiple sets to throw into the shop for the next update.

New Beads!

Here are all of the beads going into the shop tomorrow night after I get my kidlets tucked into bed.  I have other news to share about our family expanding and Little Horse as he moves through his heartworm treatment, but I need a few more days to process the vet visit from yesterday.  

I promise, I will catch you up next week.  Maybe.  I shouldn't make promises when I've been such a shoddy blogger and bead maker over the last two months. 

So.

Without further ado.  Here are the latest beads.

Raku on ochre.

Raku on black.  Because I know you all lurve these.

Coral on blue grey.

Amber and purple tablets.  Once I started mixing transparents and using my smashers, I couldn't stop myself!

A mixed set.

More raku, this time on a pale lavender.

Dark topaz and teal.

Amber spacers.  They can be etched for a sea glass effect if you want. :)

Medium topaz and teal.

And light topaz and teal.  I was just loving this color comb so much I had to try every shade!

Ivory spacers that are a bit more crackly that what you can see in this photograph.

And lastly, light green with teal.  

I loved working with the transparents and even more in using my smashers to make the tablet shapes.  But the transparents are a real bear to clean because every speck of bead release must be removed so it will not be seen in the hole tunnel.  It may be awhile before I come back to this design, so grab em up fast tomorrow night!

I am hoping to find torch time next week and will be focusing on eggs again.  I won't be doing custom orders this time around, but will be making multiple sets to drop in my shop for the next update.

Just a Quick Tease

I just wanted to pop in and share a quick pic of all those 90+ beads I made two months ago and finally got around to cleaning and photographing.

Yesterday was a busy day.  I flew into Pittsburgh and had a lunch and meeting with one of my customers.  I LOVE meeting nice people!  Got stuck trying to leave the Pittsburgh airport due to many flights being delayed and ended up flying into Boston and driving to Providence, RI.  I have never been to Rhode Island before.  So far, it's been a bit wet, cold and overcast.  We'll see if that changes.

This afternoon I will be flying through Philadelphia before heading back to Atlanta.  Depending on free-wifi availability at airports, I will set up more blog posts for this week showing the individual bead sets above that will be landing in my shop this Friday evening.

Happy Tuesday!