I finally figured something out...

I'm at almost 3,000 page views on my blog. Wish that they were all subscribers! That's still stuck at 11 loyal readers.

I've been trying to figure out for the longest time where the little blips of readers, or at least clickers-on to the page -- maybe they run screaming in fear back into cyberspace from whence they came -- where they're coming from, because they're from all over the world -- and I can tell that because of the stats/tracker function on Blogspot -- but what has been spurring it? The penny dropped this morning: the blips of readers come every time I add something to my deviantArt page, and particularly if one of my pieces gets picked up by a totally different group there, two of which I've just joined -- and which opens up whole new audiences. Verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry interesting. All that from one website -- and that is also what is driving the people from Etsy (deviantArters all) who add me to their circles there.

Meanwhile back here on snowy earth, I haven't heard back yet from the clients of the big transcription job (the one that was missing about 3 to 4 hours of tape!) if they've found the missing speeches, so I'm spending this week making jewellery -- and sleeping. I went to bed at 6:30 last night, read for 20 minutes, and except for Max getting me up once, I pretty much slept for 12 hours straight. Max, of course, is back hard at it:

Happy Valentine's Day to you all, especially the cynics among us. And as someone wrote elsewhere:

Be grateful for Valentine's Day... 

50% off on premium chocolate on February 15th!

Chocoholics of the world, rejoice!
And stock up!!!!!!!!

Meanwhile, back here in the real world...

This is another in my minimalist wrap series I made for the guys. Hemp-wrapped resin eagle talon pendant with copper jump rings. I must have spent an hour wrapping and rewrapping this to try to get it right.

Funny how the more wraps I made every which way, the less stable the whole thing became. But this won't slip off either end of the flat part up top. 

The talon itself is about 2 inches high. I left the hemp strings long if someone wanted to add some beads.  

A very dramatic vision of a pair of "market-priced" crystal earrings. Silver-plated ear wires, Chinese crystal rondelles (my new favourite shape, they are sooo useful), two 4mm Swarovski crystals (the real thing!), pewter daisy spacers, silver-plated ear wires. A lot of bling for not much ka-ching. 

This is the real colour of the earrings above, although the picture above shows that bronze-coloured crystals would be very effective. I plan to do a whole series of these in birthstone colours once I get a chance to get to Toronto.

Today and the rest of the week... I'll be wrapping some sodalite puff hearts in sterling silver, making the tutorial for that which I promised two weeks ago, continuing on with another Tree of Life pendant... more earrings and necklaces...