Happy Halloween everybody!!!  Here are pictures of Anna and Shannon!  Anna is an 80’s girl and Shannon is a 60’s beatnik with dreads (dreds?).   The two other girls are a streetwalker and someone with ALOT of bronzer on them, ha ha!!  i have every halloween picture of anna and shannon since they were six!!  they have really grown!! 

Switching subjects, did you all know that Pluto is not a planet anymore?  I found that out a little late and decided to google it.  You should check it out, it is fascinating!!  Oh, and what got me on this subject tonight is that i saw my very FIRST shooting star in my whole life.  I have never seen one and I made a wish!!  i hope it comes true. 

Remember, I will be at the Yelton’s Troll trunk show and it will also be a Kalypso Beads trunk show as well!!!!  Buy two and get one free!  You should see the beads i am working on, they are turning out quite well, I think you all will want some!!  talk soon

2004, aaaawwwww they were so cute then!!  Now look at them, ha ha!!!

I took beads to Yelton’s yesterday and they are in the case so feel free to stop by and check them out!!  I love the colors, i hope you like them too!  I am off to Benihana, i love it there.  Oh, that ginger dressing is so good, and the fried rice……..

This is a big bead and it has pure silver .999 bead caps that are riveted on.  The bead caps are textured and then the patina was achieved by dipping in liver of sulphur and sealing in the colors achieved through the process.  Look for more bead caps in the future!!!  Maybe they will say things as well, not just textures.

Now you see me, now you don’t!!  One of my stocks with the crystals!

This one is called “Santa’s Little Red Corvette”, i named all of the beads this time PRINCE songs!

The blue and topaz beads are beauties in real life, i could not get a realistic picture for some reason.

More camouflage!

So, technically I was supposed to be in Chicago from thursday and probably coming home today.  However, Mark went out of town which left me to take my daughter to the JVO tryouts this weekend.  Thursday night came and Anna had a fever, it went down in the morning and so she went to school friday.  I took advil up half way through the day and she seemed fine.  Friday evening came and my beautiful fair haired child became a red beacon that radiated in the dark, ha!!  102 degree fever through the night.  Saturday morning we had tryouts and they lasted for two hours.  We contemplated what the consequences would be if we did not go, well, in a nutshell no volleyball for a year and less instruction for high school ball, scholarship potential, you get the drift.  I loaded her up with advil, strawberries, kiwi, apples and peanut butter and finally a wheat/cheese sandwich.  On the way, we stopped for orange juice and by the time we got there it looked as if her fever was coming down.  Needless to say, she did great and last night we received a call that they wanted her to play on one of their teams.  They were impressed with the fact that she would attempt a tryout in her condition and not only that play up to par!!!!  Yay, it all worked out and she will be able to play volleyball starting december through june of 2009!  It will be good for her to keep her hands on the ball for the year.  I on the other hand have a horrible headache that has plaqued me for two days and my nose is stopped up!  The moral of this story is:  It was a good time for Mark to go out of town!!!!!  lol!!!  No pictures of the beads i made last week, sorry, i will get to them as soon as possible.  Also, this weekend my stuff has been back out of the new studio because they painted my concrete floor.  I can walk in socks starting today and I am going to put my stuff back in a carefully as i can but i may mess it up.  It is simple though, i have to make more beads for my Yelton’s delivery the middle of the week.  I am getting a big rug for the entrance for the parts that will not catch popping glass so if there are wheel marks where i wheeled my stuff back in, oh well,  maybe i can touch it up with paint!!!!  talk soon, enjoy this video, I have loved lacey since she was on “So you think you can dance”!!!  That one is a firecracker and I don’t know if Lance can handle her, snicker snicker!!!!

So you all know that i expected my chair to be comfortable because i wanted to watch tv at night after Mark goes to bed, BUT this is kinda like what I got!!!

moar funny pictures
Anyways, i have some very cool beads but it is rainy out so my pictures will have to wait!!!!! I talked to Tina at Yelton’s today and I am going to be showing my beads during their Troll trunk show in November. I am very excited to meet some of you and I will have a nice amount of beads on display! It will be fun and if you have been in their store when they have these events (which i am sure quite a lot of you have), it is crazy in there, but i love it!!!!! pictures later!!!

So, You know which colors I am talking about right???  The beads that I love to make are back!!  You know, as a beady girl, you go through periods of change and experimentation.  It will happen time and time again, but I decided to make the kind of beads I always loved a few months ago.  Please comment if you love this color combo, i need the feedback, PLEASSSSEEEEEE!!!  Also, one silver reduction glass in stringer form, one encased under clear and one bead left alone made two different colors.  i love the salmon/turquoise color that came out of the big bead, although the big bead was just an experimentation in colors on one big platform.  ok, off to torch and make some more!!!  Oh, did i tell you I am having the furniture company come today and look at my big ugly chair.  After much patience I have decided that it is not ok to have your butt sucked into a big hole in the back of the chair everytime you sit.  Max literally fell back into the hole and could not get his back end out this morning, i had to push him out while I tried to get out of the chair myself.  Girlfriends from Chicago, you know what I mean!!!!!!!  Have a great day!!

I will post pics tomorrow if my beads turn out like i expect them to.  I have been battling a horrible headache all day and i am going to the hot tub right after this.  There is not much to write about today!   I hope everyone remembers to laugh and smile as much as possible because it cannot get any better than that!!!  I even laughed with my headache, of course it hurt more (ha) but hey, it improved my mood!  20 minutes in the hot tub ought to help me ease into bed to watch a movie i rented.  Mark is gone and the dogs and i get to have a slumber party!!!  hee hee!  That means that they get to sleep wherever they want on the bed, I get to stay up with the tv on as late as I want and well, uh, that is pretty good in my book!  i will write later gators!!

Well, i only got to make 5 beads this weekend because i was lazy, although, they do take a bit of time, trying to deal with the silver and all!  So, here are the pictures i took of the beads i made.  They are .999 pure silver and they are really cool!  I love the patina, it is hard to see it on the pictures.  I have 22k gold accents in these beads, how much fun is this hobby????  I love it, i think i am going to make a ring and incorporate a glass bead that i make.  Fun Fun Fun!!!  Off to basketball conditioning with Anna!!!

oh, crappy glass beads from the crappy glass jar!  They are just for something to add to the pictures.

I am a mother of a 14 year old athlete as you might or might not know.  I have clocked in soooo many hours between martial arts, soccer, basketball, and volleyball.  Soccer is year round select soccer and finally Anna decided to just concentrate on volleyball and basketball!  Today was the division championships between all 10 schools in our division and our school (my daughter and some of my adopted daughters) won their divisions and a big trophy.  They will have a huge banner on the wall of the gym and let me tell you it has been since 2001 since any of the teams have won volleyball CHL champs so I am ecstatic.  They played 6 games in a row and took it all!!!!  I am scorekeeper with the coach and it was pins and needles.  What is exciting to me is that there was a Junior Olympic coach in attendance and Anna and two other of the girls will try out this weekend all the way into november for a spot on one of the national or local teams.  There will be hundreds of girls in attendance and hopefully my girl will get a setter position!  It costs anywhere from 1000k to 4000k and offers them a HUGE chance in a scholarship for college!  Of course I would have to travel but I will do whatever I have to do for her to be a healthy and happy competitor.  She loves the game of volleyball the best and so do I.  If she makes one of the teams I will be ecstatic even though i will be driving her 1 hour away 2 days a week, not bad for the best in this part of the country!!!!  Wish us luck because my little 5 foot girl has her eyes set on stealing one of the tall girls spots which will be hard because technically they are very tall!  Ok, off to eat, i have done too much eating already this weekend!  I hopefully will not be sluggish tomorrow when i go in the studio!!!  have a great one!  Ciao

So, I delivered beads today!  I am not sure when they will go out so you might want to give it a couple of days.  I am going to play with silver this weekend so hopefully I will have something good come of it!!!  Have a great weekend! 

So I was outside trying to catch the sunlight (because it helps my pictures look more true to their colors) when all of a sudden a squirrel enticed my dogs to take off.  Ugh, that is how i feel right now because when they do this they are gone forever until we go and search for them, which takes a couple of hours or more.  Hey, it is a very dense area and a whole golf course.  Ok, well back to beads.  I made some cool ones and here is a sneek of a few of them.  The big one is a 1/2 inch hole and it will be lined and maybe have bead caps as well that i make out of pmc.  ok, have a great day, I have to drink more coffee to get in the swing of looking for my dogs.  They may be white but they sure do not look like that when i find them.  UGH! 

the side of my front yard and a small part of my back yard!  We have three acres of woods attached to a lot more woods!

See, very big, I would hang it on a troll necklace probably!  It will be cool riveted and capped in silver

My friend and customer Sandi made this for me, what a sweety!  She specializes in Wedding servers and just about any kind of utensil.  she wireworks the whole thing, it is lovely and I am giving a big shout out to her, thanks again Sandi!  If anyone is interested in a gift or a wedding treasure please let me know and i will give you the info.  She has had her hands full with her dad in ICU and it has been tough but she wants you all to know that I can give you the info if need be.  Please pray for her dad!!  Bless his heart!

I was watching the view and this little girl named Gabi wilson who is ONLY 11 years old sang and played the piano to Alicia Keys!  Not bad at all for a youngster, i think we will hear about her in the future.  She has a lot of soul for her age, and range.  What a cutey, she plays 4 instruments as well and gets straight A’s in school like my Anna Banana!  Watch:

Well you all know i love pranks so I was watching Ellen on my tv in my studio this morning, oh my gosh, I love my new studio (pics eventually), AND (yes i know this is a run on sentence) Ellen had Dennis Quaid on and he had to prank the people at starbucks.  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!  How funny it was!  Oh, pics of beads tomorrow, i think i am going to be happy with what comes out because i felt happy about what went in, understand?  I will be thoroughly disgusted if the new colors i just got in the mail today are not what I wanted.  Anyhoo, enjoy the video!!

Ok people, they are there!!  Oh my, i love the frosted dichro “inner diva” beads with the cubic zirconia’s, i cannot say it enough, they glow!  Also, the “gold digger” beads are just lovely!  Make sure you let Yelton’s know if you like them because I want to make those on a regular basis along with my other one of a kind beads.  Sometimes it is hard to constantly make one of a kinds because in order to make production (more of) you can kind of get into a rhythm and make more of a certain type without sitting there thinking too much about what you want to do.  Of course I love women, I am one of them so i had names in mind for the two i would love to have regularly!  We go about our daily lives and it seems with all of the running around we do not embrace our “inner diva’s” so that is where the name came from.  The “gold digger” name is just cute and OF COURSE we would never think of actually BEING gold diggers but hey, they have gold and diamonds in them so there you have it!!!  I will take pictures of my completed studio once my floor is done and my door is on and darnit I cannot find a rug i love for the entrance.  I love this rug site called Funky Rugs http://www.funkyrugs.co.uk/shop/customer/home.php?cat=193

I love the contemporary ones!  Oh my, and great color combos and bead ideas!  My daughters just go nuts because everything to me reminds me of a bead, ha!!! 
This happens to be a new video of Snowball dancing to “Another one bites the dust” not to the backstreet boys!! I love it!

Ok, so i have been making a lot of dichro beads and decided that i wanted to etch them to make them glow from within!  However, i have seen this before and decided to make them truly mine I would add shiny bling to the outside as well which is tricky because when you etch you do not want that element etched as well.  I also wanted to make them bumpy, so some are and some are not.  These are a mixture of my “Inner Diva” beads with bling on the outside!  I love these, they are so cool looking and I wanted them to not be perfect just beautiful in their own right!!  Back to the torch

The beads went to yelton’s today but they are having a pandora event so i am sure that they will not even get processed until Monday.  If I were you guys I would just wait because it is so crazy in there that they did not even have time to look at my beads or talk to me!  Have a great weekend!!  You guys are going to love the “Inner Diva” beads and the “Gold Digger” beads.  A new style that i am sure will you will all like!  I am going to have to make me a whole bracelet of them both!!  Oh, and before I go, i took a picture of my first pmc creation, it is a two sided lentil with a bail attached to it!  I put it in the liver of sulphur to patina it and it turned out pretty good for my first time.  hey, i love doing things like that.  Now i get to work with pmc which is metal clay, silver or gold or bronze.  You mold it, texture it, fire it, sand it, patina it and polish it, yay!!!!

Well, I just cannot have a contest with 2 emails so i am suspending the “around the world free” contest for now!  When and if more people show an interest in this contest I will try again!  It is unclear whether people just do not want the beads, do not want to send me something, I don’t know!  I know people are busy and I thought it would be a cool thing to do but I cannot win them all so for now, no contest!  Take at a look at the new beads below, more out of the kiln in around 3 hours!  i love that time, it is like looking under the christmas tree when I was little, as I ran down the stairs and started counting the presents that were mine!  Honestly, it really is, making things are so cool!!!