Beading Weekend and "The Crud"

Lily watching it snow

I don't know about you guys but it snowed here again yesterday.  I had to take a picture of mom's youngest cat as she sat in the window watching the white stuff come down.  When the flakes are huge, she is like a psycho kitty trying to catch them at the window.


Start of brainstorming for Bead Soup


It has been awhile since mom and I have done anything bead, metalsmithing, or torching related and I was jonesing to work in the studio.  Mom and I started our brainstorming session of what we wanted to do with the goodies for our Bead Soup pieces.  Oh, so you know, we have the goodies in the laundry room because Lily was trying to make off with the bag of goodies, so had to move the goodies to a place she is not allowed into.  This is the first layout of the goodies, mom got our beading trays out and we started breaking down what we liked and didn't like.  I am showing you the start because I nixed this idea and we came up with a different one for this piece.  We finally came up with ideas for three pieces and got the pieces on the beading boards to begin the putting together process.


Mom sawing out pendants

I had a whole list of things that I asked mom to saw out for me to enamel.  This is her working away at sawing those pendants.  The thing on her head is a maginfying glasses so she can see what she is sawing - her "old peoples eyes" need a little help sometimes :)


Torch table with glass for the Bead Soup beads

While mom was sawing, I went out to the garage to work on making beads as accent for the Bead Soup pieces.  The opaque green and the dark transparent green are two handmade glasses that I love to work with.  Mom especially loves it when I make my fishscale beads out of these two colors.  I didn't get a chance to work on the fishscale beads I was trying something else with the beads.  I still haven't seen how they turned out.  Mom just said "They are okay" when I asked if she liked them.  Nice mom :)  That means to me, make the fishscale beads kid.

Today I wanted to enamel but I am sort of feeling like the woman in the photographs.  I have felt sort of off all week, but yesterday I really started to feel bad.  As Erin, of Treasures Found, calles it "The Crud".  I have a stuffy nose, sore throat and (not sure how to explain it) a heaviness in my chest.  So, overall, I feel like crud.  I am taking mom's advice and I am not going to work in the garage today, though I really want to.



"The Captive Robin" piece we did for Dec. Monthly Challenge



"Winterwonderland" with Kristen's beads

So, instead today I will work on cropping, resizing and posting inventory on Etsy.  I think mom is going to work on sawing out pendants and pieces for February's monthly challenge.