Friday 22 April 2011

Spot the mistake



Easy to see the mistake. Very comfortable to wear, though. 17.5" long.
Hubei turquoise, matte lapis lazuli, amethyst, with copper findings.

Ack... without checking, I hurriedly crimped both ends, et voila. Dumb-de-dumb-dumb. I have enough beads to remake this, or I could take this one apart... or I could keep it to wear myself -- people are always nagging me about wearing my own jewellery but I never remember to, and find most jewellery to be irritating, which is why I don't. On the other hand, this is very comfortable even if I do say so myself.

I'm pursuing my goal of eventually moving to a smaller place, if not an RV, by -- ta da! -- getting rid of stuff. I burned a great many papers yesterday that were stuffed and stacked everywhere and swept puppy fluff off the floors. I even found some more receipts from last year. But too late -- taxes are done and gone. It's still cold here, snow this morning of all things, and damp in the house from the rains so I had to have another fire anyway yesterday and this morning, but it's supposed to get quite warm over the weekend, albeit with accompanying monsoons. Good for the trees and farmers.

I've had no transcription work to speak of for two months now. It's heart-feeling-like-a-bag-of-broken-glass scary, but it always is: every year it's like this, slow from mid-February until mid-August. Every day these past two weeks in particular has been feeling like a lazy Sunday, with an emphasis on lazy. I need to get out of this mindset. Hence picking up papers. I also dusted off and set up two grid panels to help in sorting the stones that I have and want to sell.


I had a 50 gram package of PMC3 left from last fall and made up new slip. These two weeks I've been hard at work coating new bacopa leaves, for which I have an order to make earrings, sage leaves which I've run out of, and carrying on coating lily leaves and maple keys left over from last year, all of which will be fired on Tuesday after spending the next two or three days cleaning off blobs of clay and drilling the jump ring holes.

Talk about sticker shock, though. I just priced a 50 gram package of PMC3: it's now $129 plus tax. Last spring it was under $90. The last package I bought in the fall was about $96. This is madness.

Clockwise from lower left, maple keys, sage leaves, chinese lily leaves, house plant(?), bleeding heart(?), more Chinese lily and bacopa. Interestingly, everything except the bacopa were started last summer.

Closeup of sage leaves, Chinese lily, bacopa and a few maple keys

I guess I'd better leave this alone. I appear to have turned this whole post into a giant caption, and cannot turn off the background colour and text colour effects. 


Friday 1 April 2011

Good taste -- and tastes good

Under usual circumstances, most art is appreciated through just a few of the senses: vision, perhaps touch when you're talking sculpture, memories invoking place and time. But it's almost never, ever edible.  Except...

On display and available at the Woodstock Farmers Market on Nellis Street every Saturday morning and for pickup through the week, Rene Hoelscher's Let's Eat Cake cakes and cookies are funny, whimsical, not to mention incredibly beautiful, hand-sculpted stand-alone works of art. And they taste sooooooooooooo good, made as they are with pure, fresh ingredients.


Cake piggy that I am (I've been cut off from the free samples), I'm not the only one who thinks so: check out what the Ontario Wedding Blog has to say.

I've begun providing cake jewellery at Rene's behest, so if you're planning a wedding or require dazzle-your-guests'-socks-off cakes or cookies with bonus off-the-charts "Oh, wow! Is that ever cool!" you can contact either of us at the market or via the usual virtual multitude of means.

Stay tuned: for those firmly grounded in physical reality who believe cake in hand is worth 478 gazillion hits online, Rene's bricks and mortar bakery will be opening later this spring in downtown Woodstock.