Design Time

I know it's been a good couple of beading days when my right forearm is all achy. That's also my signal to STOP and give it a rest already! Besides, I'm at that point in a design when I'm so twisted and turned in my thoughts that I realize I probably have no perspective left. I'll leave it overnight and look at it in the morning. I bet I'll like it lots more in the (mid)morning when I wake up fresh.

I have quite a bit of designing to do, but the ideas are popping up like crazy in my head so my only problem is time and physical limitations. It's a lot better than when I'm up against the design wall and my head is E M P T Y like a balloon.

I have a lot of half-finished projects around the house that are driving me nuts. The reorg of the office space - I thought I'd be done by now! Instead I haven't even finished unpacking the Bead & Button Show boxes let alone shift the current furniture and go buy and assemble more.  I owe you guys photos of my Bead & Button loot. (But notice that this is the THIRD post this week! Go Jill!) It will all get done...eventually...and by eventually I mean I hope before I die...

There's a lot of socializing on the immediate horizon too! So unusual for me since I turn into a total hermit when I'm at home. But Thursday is the first of several farewell parties for my dear friend and former boss, Mick McNulty, who is moving to Florida. Friday and Saturday nights are my 25th High School Reunion. Did I really type twenty-five?? Holy Cow. Sunday night one of those high school friends will be performing in Austin and I never get to hear him sing any longer so that's a must-see. After that point, I will need to retreat to my little beading cave for solitary confinement again. It's a necessary evil.

A little OCD

I read a quote in a magazine tonight that spoke to me quite perfectly. "If someone told me that I could only eat the same 12 foods for the rest of my life, I'd be perfectly okay with that." Which is not to say I don't eat a variety of foods! But I do tend to get "stuck" on favorites. For the last few years, I've eaten edamame at least three times a week (and sometimes 5 times a week) because it's my number one comfort food.

I also tend to get into these oddball cleaning sprees. All of a sudden, I want everything clean and organized and purged and I want it all done NOW NOW NOW. My beloved pile of magazines has been growing like a weed for quite a while now, so I sat down earlier tonight to go through it. It's now 6 hours later, and I'm still going through them. I can't bear to just throw them out without at least leafing through the pages and speed reading the occasional story. So I've worked my way through 9 of them (yes, I just went and counted) and I still have a stack of 27 left. I guess this will be a multi-night project.

What I'm supposed to be doing is sleeping so that I can get up Saturday morning and get to The Container Store for supplies. Mom and I have big organizing plans afoot for the weekend that include moving where we've been storing the kits, moving a bunch of office furniture, and adding more office furniture from Ikea. So naturally we have to put it together ourselves.

But right now, I just want to go through one more magazine...

In the meantime...

What a week! I've been hunkered down, working on a set of jewelry pieces I needed to make for a corporate client, and the deadline was today. Eight pieces in 10 days. AGH! How do I get myself into these things? Oh yeah...a complete and total inability to say "no." I'm learning, though, I'm learning!

And what's worse is that I can't even show them to you! Some may be used in an advertisement so they have to be undercover. But I'll keep you posted if and when I can show them off! I'm quite happy with the way they turned out.

Now my attention can turn to the rest of my urgent projects. Namely, getting ready for the annual Shreveport Bead Retreat in 4 weeks. And getting the new teaching proposal projects finished for Bead & Button Show 2011 submissions in 4 weeks. And a few other teaching proposal projects for a secret teaching gig I can't tell you about yet. I'm full of secrets lately! But trust me...they're good ones!

I had these lovely plans of showing you photos of my super quick shopping at the Bead & Button Show, but I was too down to the wire on the deadline and didn't have time to get them done. But look for photos tomorrow! Really! I can't wait to show you!

Bead & Button Show, Part II

At last. Part II. If I can still remember any of it. I spent the day today thinking it was Wednesday, and Mom spent the day thinking it was Friday, so we averaged out at Thursday. And you expect me to remember weeks ago???

So when we last left our plucky Bead & Button teacher (that would be me,) it was Wednesday - Meet the Teacher's Day. Also known as Beady Chaos & Nirvana Packed into One Ballroom for Three Hours Day. But it wouldn't be as easy as just showing up. Nay! (I'm channeling Barbara Cartland here, folks, not braying like a horse.) I had to teach the 3rd of 4 Kumihimo classes from 4pm - 7pm, and the MTT event starts at 8pm. If you can do the math, that leaves just 1 hour between those two events, which is where Wonder Mom comes in. Having a Wonder Mom is a critical component of my success. She would be in charge of getting all the kits and display items set up in the ballroom since I was going to be tied up with my class. We also enlisted the assistance of my Austin friend, Gwen Youngblood. We knew it was going to be a doozy.

But wait! Where are the kits and display items, you might ask? Why they are all still tightly jammed into the car in the parking garage! So Wonder Mom managed to unload everything from the car, using one small dolly cart in a bazillion trips back and forth through the skywalk from the hotel parking garage to the convention center ballroom. Uphill a disturbing amount of the way. It's not for the faint of heart. Honestly, when I think about it, it make me want to give her a raise.

My class took a while to pack up, and by the time I got to the Ballroom, the table was set up to the point of perfection, and I had ten minutes to assimilate. And then they let Them in. The Hoards. The Ladies. The ravenous bead buying public.

At that point it all becomes blurry in my mind. I remember people being 3-5 deep in front of our booth all night. I remember periodically looking up and seeing some of my wonderful bead world friends. I remember laughter and excitement and lots and lots of kits being sold. Our credit card machine wasn't working wirelessly in the ballroom this year, so before long we had a do-it-yourself kind of checkout line going. Gwen would pull the kits for the ladies and hand them their merchandise. Then they would get into the cash register line which Mom was in charge of. If they paid by credit card, Mom would hand them their receipt and point them to me so I could write down their credit card info by hand. We won't be playing that game next year! I will have it figured out how I can store all the credit card info in the machine even if it doesn't connect, but it was literally too insane to stop and have me play with the menu to get it fixed. There might have been a riot.

The three hours was over in a flash. All of a sudden we looked up and it was over. The circus had left town, and all that remained was the broken down wreck of a crew. We still had to pack everything up and move it back upstairs to the Expo Hall so we could set up the booth on Thursday. Not the easiest of tasks since we had schlepped SO much stuff to the Ballroom. Next year, two carts for moving stuff around for sure. It was midnight before we dragged ourselves back to the room. I'm pretty sure we said OMG about way too many times. But OMG!

So I managed to drag that day out long enough to be a whole post of it's own. Guess there's a Part III in my future!