Things to do...things to do

Busy week. Signed up for Bead & Button on Tuesday. I was actually a little nervous sitting at my computer waiting for the registration to open up. How stupid is that. But I got all the classes that I wanted....fusing and cold joining with Anne Mitchell, color on metal with Debra Weld, and rings with Susan Kazmer. My first 4 days are spent with my long lost twin...Cristina. I don't think these people will know what hit them. Imagine me in duplicate. I think we have to be the only two people to get chastised by Celie Fago in the middle of a PMC class. I left a full day open to shop in the exhibit hall and hopefully find some time to put ideas to paper while I am there. The week is such a whirlwind that it will be nice to have a day to do nothing. Every year I go back I know more and more people. The first 2 years I made Lou go with me so I wouldn't be alone. Now it would be difficult if he did go because all my time is spent in classes or the exhibit hall and with friends.

Went to dinner with Lou's daughter, Rachael, last night. She brought Matty along...our 18 month old grandson. He is sooo cute. Everyone in the restaurant was stopping over to see him. She is trying to break him of swearing...at 18 months. He was playing with Lou and fell down on his butt. He looked up at Lou and said...."Fuck". It's hard not to laugh.

Did the business taxes tonight and trying to make my way through a pile of papers I have stacked up by my chair. Things I wanted to get to or read or things that I need to do. No wonder I am up to 2 in the morning. And to top it off I got the new Tool catalog from Rio today. OMG....it's like being a kid again and getting the toy catalog at Christmas time. I believe the term "Tool Whore" has been passed back and forth between Cris and I. I had to laugh because Mary Hettmansperger referred to herself as a book whore. I am one of those too. Tool whore, book whore, bead whore.....

I pulled a load of silver out of the kiln. Most of the pieces turned out nice. I was making hearts with faux rivets in them and they looked like mice...so I moved the faux rivets in a little bit and did make mice. They are really cute. I take some pics tomorrow. I made this really cool bead around a cork clay core. This was the one piece that I was really looking forward to seeing. Popped open the kiln to find that the bead had split open. Turns out that when firing around a solid core you need to ramp the kiln up slowly and hold at around 800 degrees for 20 minutes so the core has time to burn out prior to taking the temperature up. Who knew??? I found out by doing a search on the PMC group in Yahoo. Oh well. Shame though ... it's a heavy piece. I think I am going to line the split in the bead with tiny little balls of silver and refire....try to make it a design elements instead of a mistake. Oh Yeah...I meant for it to look like that.

How do you like this??



This is a Parisii stater ....translation...old French coin from around the 1st century BC. I've traced the design and I am going to try to transfer the image to PMC either by the tear-away technique or with a photopolymer plate. I have been searching the net for other ancient coin designs. I've found a few I like so I am going to do a small collection of pendants with these designs.

I found a couple of web sites that have some very cool transparency images that would work great in resin. The first is Crafy Individuals located in the UK. They have got a great collection of transparencies...what they call acetates....I love the vintage portraits. The other site is Tuscan Rose located in Texas.

Weekend Workshop

There's a new teacher on my Favorite's List.....Mary Hettmansperger. Our PMC guild had a weekend metals workshop with her. GREAT CLASS...GREAT TEACHER!!! We hammered, cut, punched, drilled, embossed, textured, torched and twined copper sheet metal. We also combined it with PMC and fired it. Half way through today's class I was exhausted.

I took my splint off before class....good thing...with my clumsiness this week I would have probably caught it on fire. I ended up hitting my thumb 3 times with the hammer. I finally realized I should hold the small pieces with a pair of pliers while hammering...DUH.

Mary with Wendy at the torch

Vanessa, Brenda, Deb and Jen...all hard at work on their projects.

Colleen (VP), Cathy (Pres), and Mary Ann

Mary with Deb. Dulcie and Jan in the background.

The pic sucks...but here are some of my projects....they all need to be finished. Upper left and lower right we sandwiched extruded PMC between sheets of copper. Upper right and lower left are PMC and copper combined and fired. The other pieces are just some experiments with copper and color. I was amazed at the colors that you could get from copper. I think that was my favorite part....pulling the copper from the torch and watching the color spread across the piece.

Check out Mary's website. She is talented in so many things. Her gourds, baskets and weavings are amazing. And she is very nice and has a great sense of humor. The weekend was a blast. Too bad I have to go back to work tomorrow. All I want to do is stay home and work with the new techniques.