More Cleaning Up, Organisation & Storage -- & LAPIS!

Lynn McLean came again yesterday morning to organise me and help me with cleaning. I should have taken before shots, but oooooh, boy, nasty. The kitchen table was piled a foot deep with the detritus of pricing and restringing beads for the show -- gee, a week and a half ago. I was and still am typing like a mad fiend since and hadn't touched the table. Here are pictures of my (temporarily, I assure you) tidier place.

Yeah, yeah, a plug for Royal Canin -- Max developed massive hair loss all over his back and sides in an extremely bizarre pattern in the spring, and instead of plunking down several hundred more dollars for a second round of blood tests, the vet suggested changing his food first. Now, I had noticed that my previous dog food company had changed their bag designs, deleting the particular dog food version entirely that I had been buying and feeding Max with no problems for, oh, ten years maybe? After the bag change, he started losing his hair. Maybe they also changed the formulation, d'ya think? I shudder to think where the ingredients came from and I wonder if Max was the only one to suffer this type of hair loss. In the meantime, I had had him shaved for the summer so it was very easy to see that within a few weeks of starting him on the Royal Canin his hair was starting to grow in and now there is only one tiny half-baldish spot remaining. I am amazed.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my almost pristine table at 5:42 a.m. this morning...

Doesn't take long, does it? 8:15 a.m. after photographing lapis beads...

My somewhat cleaned up bedroom. No before picture. It was grotty to the Max... Poor Max, gets blamed for everything. Silly I guess to have a white duvet with a mostly black dog living in the country, no paving, just mud as far as the eye can see. The little staircase I'd bought at a flea market, and were stairs for the owner's late dog to get up onto their bed. Alas, Max is too gimped up for them, so I keep my mattress on the floor and now the stairs make for even better bedside storage, far more useful than the table I had there previously.

Now we're back to normal. This table had been almost completely clear about three weeks ago.

But this is still pretty tidy and working well for me. Note there are ever-more bins...

Oh, all right, just a couple of lapis pictures. This is pretty much the true colour of all the lapis here in this first picture. As with my turquoise pictures, I'm finding it almost impossible to get the blue right. It is a true dark ultramarine with plenty of pyrite.

And Max again, just 'cause he's so beautiful...

Thanks for looking!

Some Bead Show pictures...

Emphasis on the word "some". My camera has decided not to download pictures to the computer. The computer does its "ka-dunk" sound and the camera turns itself off when I try. It worked fine yesterday morning to get these pictures off the camera, but the pictures I took for over an hour yesterday afternoon of all the matte lapis, Afghanistan and Tibetan turquoise and coin silver beads that I bought there? Still locked in the camera. Maybe I'll scan some pictures and at least give you an idea of what I have. Sigh............ back to primitive pre-digital camera technology. So much for cameras worth hundreds of dollars. Maybe that's why, when I bought it, the guy talked me into a 2-year repair/replacement warranty -- in fact he said, "Oh, we don't repair cameras anymore. We'll just give you another one." It's only 18 months old! This is madness, the world we live in now.

Anyway, back to the relatively sane world of bead addiction. Pictures from the Grand River Bead Society Bead Show in Guelph:

Lynn McLean, visual merchandiser, working her magic on my table. She's also trying to organise me at home. This is her business and she's GOOD. In fact, I was told by one of the show organisers that my table looked a whole lot better than last year. Uh... thanks, I think.

Me. Sleep deprived to the max and doing things I should have done weeks ago.

Next year, I want to use risers to get the table level up.
On the other hand, that means that it will be difficult to get at the beads on the grids.
Lynn didn't stop tweaking the table the whole two days.

Kalimantan glass beads, old chevrons and African sandcast beads.

Kingman boulder rondelles, rounds, Kingman blue rondelles and rounds, Sleeping Beauty nuggets and large blueblueblue Kingman nuggets...

Chinese saucers, Hubei rounds, Ma'an Shan nuggets, Campo Frio, Pinto and Castle Dome,
more large blueblueblue Kingman nuggets...

 



A display case of large turquoise nugget strings.
The postcard photo shows the young man with a joclaw at the bottom of his necklace.

Another show done and gone. Now to get everything online. Once I get a functioning camera I'll get the new pix online. Email me if you see anything here you're interested in.

Thanks for looking!