Sluggin' and Chuggin' Along

Somehow I thought I'd be done moving back in the house by now, but I certainly should have known better. But massive progress is being made. Tonight I was up all night working on the monster known as The Bead Room. I need a trip to The Container Store and a trip to Big Lots for more storage containers. There are about 7 boxes of mishmash that need to be sorted through and homes found for the contents. I'm still contemplating whether I need to put a table or a couple of short bookcases back-to-back in the middle of the room. The room is already so small, and I quite literally have every inch of wall space taken up with shelves and the desk, so it's the center of the room or nothing. Maybe I can consolidate and purge a little more...

Saturday is also a BIG day because Mom and I are going to head on down to the store fixtures store and get our slat wall panel! This will go in the front room where I have all the beads for sale, and once we get that installed the the beads hung up, that room will be finished! Yippee!

So you know how I had that poll for what class you wanted me to teach at the Texas Bead Retreat? Yeah. Well. How about something totally different?!! Because the earrings class was the low vote getter. And after figuring out everything that's going into the Grapevine Bracelet, I decided I couldn't really teach that as a short class. And despite having touched nearly every bead I own in the last week, the Tila beads remain elusive little suckers. I guess they must be in one of the dreaded mishmash boxes. Where they could remain for QUITE some time.

My new plan since time is up for me to get the class info to Sandy Pardo? I'm going to teach Smadar Grossman's amazing Mumbai Masala bracelet!

Blues Clues

From June:
The day before we were having the laminate floors done in the house, Jill convinced me to paint the bead room. I'm not sure which of us is crazier. She picked the Tapestry Beads turquoise as the main color. Not a color I'd normally use, but it's a room that only Jill and I go into, and that color makes us happy.

Of course I ran out of paint and had to finish the job after the floor was laid in that room. When I was done painting, I went into the kitchen and saw blotches of turquoise all over the newly-laid tile. I back-tracked, and found splotches of paint on the laminate too. I must have stepped in a drip of paint and tracked it all over. #@&%. It took a while to get it all up, but finally, finally, I was done.

It wasn't until later that evening when I saw that I was not the one who had stepped in paint!

Picking a class for the Texas Bead Retreat

I need your help again! It's time for me to pick a project to teach at the Texas Bead Retreat in January 2011. I've got a number of ideas, and I'd love to know what y'all think! So I created a poll over there <--- to the left. Please vote!

I've been wanting to do my own gorgeous version of a grapevine bracelet/necklace for years now, but I never finished the sample I started in 2007. Yeah - really 2007. In all the house ruckus, I rediscovered it, sitting sadly in a box, waiting for some attention. And now I'm reinvigorated to work on it again - especially since there are more options for drop beads these days and I will be making the grape clusters with several different sizes and shapes for a textured look.

Tila beads are all the rage at the moment, of course, and I'd love to have an excuse to play with them! I'm thinking of a layered 3-dimensional type of bracelet.

One of my Austin students has been pestering me for an all-earrings class. What do y'all think?? It would be three completely different styles of earrings. I think we could accomplish that in the time frame allotted there.

If you have something entirely different you'd like to propose, I want to hear it! Send me an email or a comment, okay?

On a different note: a further update with photos of the house renovations is coming soon! I can't believe what a change has gone on in this house in the last 30 days. Don't pinch me....I don't want to wake up if it's a dream!

The Tile Work is DONE

From June:
Jill is still asleep (anyone surprised?) But she had a very stressful day yesterday. She had to deal with tile laying mistakes and non-English-speaking tile layers while I went to work. If you are friends with Jill on Facebook, you know a little of what went on during the last few days. But that's behind us now. Jill did a great job yestarday, and we are very happy with the results. On Tuesday we start the wood laminate installation, and we are SO excited.

When we were picking tile, we decided to go bold or go home. I guess you could say we went bold AND went home. So as promised, here are some before and after pictures. The front entryway did have plain tile (boring!) which we replaced. The kitchen and bathroom had linoleum.

Front entry. Our mosaic was had made in Beirut and shipped to us.

Kitchen (same tiles as the front entry).

Master bathroom, with the infamous blue glass accent tiles

And they installed the mosaic in front of the back door. This one also was made in Beirut, but from a different company. Are mosaics a big industry in Beirut??

Evolution of a bracelet

One of the things I worked on this past weekend while in my hotel room is a lovely bracelet by Martina Nagle. I purchased this pattern from her Etsy store a while back and I even bought beads for it in June, but haven't had time to sit and work on it until now.


This is the original design that I fell in love with...
Martina's bracelet uses alternating pearls and Swarovski bicones down the center. She added the embellishment with the Size 15 seed beads only on the outside two rows. Gorgeous!

And then I saw Petra Tismer's variation on Facebook, and fell in love with this one too! Can you see the difference? Petra's version used the Size 15 embellishment on every hexagon, and added a smaller firepolish bead in the center of each one.

I had decided to do Petra's variation, but look! When I added the Size 15s on all the hexagons, I decided I was already done. I adore the pattern of the beads without any additional embellishment. It's like a Wedding Ring Quilt pattern in a bracelet. I also left one middle hexagon without the Size 15 embellishment so I could use it as a clasp. Adore!!

And the winning name is....

Twining Vine Lariat! What's really freaky, is that Nikki's comment suggesting that name had just been published mere minutes before Mom stumbled out of bed from a nap and said, the name of the lariat is Twining Vine. I was sitting there trying to figure out how she'd seen that blog comment when I had JUST published it! But it was actually Nikki beaming it straight into Mom's head and bypassing all this comment business. Nikki - contact me with your email and address, and you'll be getting a special prize!

I'm sitting in a hotel room in San Diego tonight, eagerly anticipating a weekend workshop with the goddess of beading, NanC Meinhardt which starts in the morning. We're beading a stick. Yeah, you read that correctly. I flew to California to bead a stick. I'm working hard on keeping my mind open - those of you who know me well are laughing your heads off right about now. But I promised myself to go with the flow. I brought an entire suitcase full of beads - 35lbs of to be exact. I hope I have the right ones. It's all NanC's fault because in her supply list it says, if you're in doubt whether to bring a bead or not, bring it. So I did!

I apologize for the long blog absence. I'd been doing so good for a while there, too! In the month I've been gone I got the flu for 5 days, taught a bead class in Lake Jackson, Texas, got a cold for 7 or 8 days, taught at Bead Fest Texas, and now I'm in San Diego. I keep waiting for a break where I get to sleep and do nothing for a few weeks, but it's not looking too good for that.

I'll be getting home on Monday night, and on Wednesday the long anticipated floor installation will begin with tile guys on Wed, Thurs, and Fri. The following week, the laminate guys will be installing on Tues+. Then we have to get the house back to normal!! And I have to prep kits for the BABE show, finish prep for the Beaducation videos shoot in November. Open house and home classes on the weekends in December. Plus lots of new kits to make, designing to do, and the holidays. It all makes me very glad I chose to take a nice long nap this afternoon!