New Bracelets going into the One of a Kind Antique Mall, Woodstock, TODAY...

Apologies for not posting more, but I have been doing nothing but typing for almost three weeks, and it has NOT stopped coming in. That's good, right? Well... not when I'm having to turn work down, it ain't.

Meanwhile, I'm having great fun with Stretch Magic, my new fave material. Remember those stretch crystal bracelets I posted a few weeks ago? They're almost all gone. 

These bead soup bracelets, along with some necklaces, are all going into the Antique Mall (showcase 800 over in the showcase area to the right of the cash desk) in Woodstock, Ontario, later this morning. (FYI, the Antmall will be closed December 25th and 26th.) They are all one of a kind. If you see something you like, I can drive there and get it (if it hasn't been sold in the meantime). I can't guarantee that it will arrive before Christmas, but... between Canada Post overnight service at megabucks per package, ya never know. (Or you can pretend you're Italian and you have until January 6th to give gifts!). Please email me for availability and handling/shipping costs. Right now, it's ***around*** $5 regular surface mail in Canada and ***around*** $10-$15 to the US for small thick envelopes and/or parcels. 

As an FYI on shipping costs, if it's shipped in a flat bubble wrap pack and fits through that plexi "mail slot" gadget they have at the post office, it's not too expensive to ship, $3-ish for Canada, BUT it ends up being "automatically" sorted which means it goes through umpteen rollers in the mail plant, so fragile beads or wire-wrapped work could get squashed. Upgrade to a thicker wrapping or flat box, and you're in the $10-$15 range for regular shipping, but the parcel is hand-sorted and you might have to drive to your local post office to pick it up. My price to mail includes the cost of the envelope/appropriate packaging, and trust me on this -- it often takes as much time if not longer to pack and drive a purchase to the post office than to make the item in the first place. Each time I see "$25 shipping" even for a tiny package of beads coming from the US, oh, man, it hurts so, so much! -- but I do appreciate all the work that goes into packing items and getting them to the post office, often within hours of me clicking on "Buy Now". 

This is so pretty. 

Note that the citrine is not that richly yellow. It's just my crappy photography.

Roman glass bracelet with aquamarine rounds and pewter daisy spacers.

Brilliant peacock blue titantium-coated hematite:

These bracelets are comfortably loose on me, so would fit about a 7-7.5" wrist. As always, if you see anything you like but you need a custom size or want to commission a custom piece, please don't hesitate to email me. 

On other fronts I've signed up for The Gem Expo coming up on March 13th-15th and booked my hotel. I WILL be there this time with lots and lots of new turquoise including some beautiful hand-carved skulls and buttons. I'll have a great selection of Roman glass, matte lapis and really nice hand-cut carnelian in unusual colours: yellows through yellowy-oranges and reds to almost chocolate purple colours from Afghanistan, plus different sizes and shapes of old chevron beads from Nepal and some great Dzi-style beads. If you have anything on your wish list, I will try to find it for you and bring it to the show. 

Thanks for looking!

Copper-Wrapped Pearl Necklace Experiments...

The robins have decided not to move in. I can't figure out if this is normal, that she would build the nest and then not lay her eggs immediately. Is it because it's too cold out here? Guess I could check online...

Here's my blue flowered back lawn... I LOVE these flowers, and forget-me-nots, too.

Meanwhile back inside the ranch sitting at my little TV dinner tray parked in front of my stoopid computer, as a lot of you have already discovered, holes in pearls typically are frustratingly tiny -- 24 gauge wire being about the only thing that will get through them. Unfortunately, at the moment all I have is dead soft wire in that gauge and it makes wrapping incredibly difficult and floppy. I have to say that it is almost impossible to do a decent wrap with dead soft wire. Most of the larger pearls I can use hard temper 22 gauge wire I buy by the pound from The Ring Lord, a great source for wire in bulk, carrying the full range of wire gauges and tempers across all the common wire types. I have no idea why I didn't buy 24 gauge hard temper. Or maybe I did and it's just lost in my messpile.

Anyway, these pearl chains are what I'm playing with these days. I will dig out my wrapped seed bead chains and start seeing about adding them, as well, but I've always wanted to play with the pearl colours. I watched the first season of Orange is the New Black on Netflix while making these this week.

I haven't quite sorted out how I'll join up the different colours on this fuschia, white and deep teal blue pearl necklace. FYI, the two burgundy-ish brown segments really tone down the red, white and blue direction this was going in. Very interesting, the difference with and without. By using jump rings, I can easily balance out the beads if someone requires a different length or if I decide to make it a double choker length.

A little dish of pearl soup. I need more colours. Sigh...

Alas, there was only the one season of Orange, so now I'm watching Once Upon A Time In Mexico for the umpteenth time and hoping that there are plenty of other Rodriguez films to get me through the weekend.  

Thanks for looking!

Cleaning up my workspace & bead organisation...

Yes, a long silence -- many apologies. I have been typing like a mad fiend for months, and every week I think just get to the end of this week and I'll have time to breathe... then more files come flying over the virtual transom. I'm swamped now until next Wednesday.

However, in the meantime, in preparation for a massive sort and pricing of the huge turquoise order on its way that I'll be offering at the Grand River Bead Society show (Guelph, October 27th & 28th), as well as another large bead order from Nelson Gemstones, I have been cleaning up the front room where I do all of my work. Note that this means my junk room out back is filling up even more, so I'm not so very virtuous. Years ago I discovered the worth of having a dedicated junk room -- but with decent functional shelving so things are more or less accessible and off the floor.

Remember the 5-Minute Manager concept from... the late '80s or early '90s? I learned one thing: handle everything once. Then there was a cleaning/clutter-busting tip from somewhere: keep stuff off the floors and rooms will automatically appear much tidier. Now if I could just STOP covering every flat surface with a foot of all that stuff from the floors... and PAPER. I hate paper. Whatever happened to that old saw that computers would do away with paper? Phhht. What I can't figure out how to deal with is the out-of-sight, out-of-mind conundrum. I'm forever putting things in "logical" places, but then they are lost forever as my logic defies... everything.

My pal Lynn (who will very shortly be offering her organisation services to all of you virtually via Skype and I'm the guinea pig) helped me do a massive cleaning yesterday (all 1/4 of my front room, whoo hoo, but progress nonetheless) -- she likes to clean and she ordered me to keep going, telling me that when she gets started she can't stop (very weird, I know). I did all the moving stuff around, the sweeping and mopping: we were a cleaning machine. Then we went to the dollar store and I got some more shallow semi-see-through bins.

This organising by shallow bin seems to be the way to go for me. I tried doing the hanging-beads-in-order-of-colour-on-a-grid next to my table the way many of my online pals do and who post pictures of their studios and working methods, but I've found I can't work that way. It may be that the bin method I've come up with will become bead soup (this truly was the breakthrough for me) writ large and yet be physically somewhat organised: I figured out that to make something I have to see what I have jumbled up and see random patterns and colour, rather than see the strings all laid out, essentially fixed to the wall, thence to deliberately put colours together in my mind. I need serendipity. It may be that with all my strings in bins sorted by colour only, showing multiple textures and graduations of that colour, that I can then I can put bins of complementary and split complementary side by side and fine tune after that.

If nothing else, I finally can see all the beads I have and stop buying duplicates. Slowly, slowly, progress is being made:

Phht... who has time to watch television anyway?

The contents of this grid shelf ended up on the floor (gack) in the bedroom closet. I was thinking that I could hang some strings from the front of the shelves, as well...

How do you work?

Big show coming up, if you're anywhere close by: the annual Ancaster Gem Show is this coming Friday, Saturday and Sunday, September 28, 29 and 30th. I'm not sure -- check before you drive out, but I believe the Friday is for school groups. Lots of fossils and dinosaur bones and raw crystal formations along with beads galore and finished jewellery.

Thanks for looking.