Cannon Beach Love

At the beach. Love it here. Need to figure out how to move here full time.

































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Location:S Hemlock St,,United States

Lulu's First Egg

Exciting times in the egg box! The chickens are squawking and making a racket. Three days of this and I finally figured out that Lulu was laying eggs - soft shelled broken eggs. And then! The magic little treasure we were waiting for - a little brown speckled egg. Thank you, Lulu!

Finally! New Beads!

Well, don't fall over in your seats or anything, but I have new beads! I know, I know, it's been a very long time. But I made it out to the messy studio and melted glass and had a blast doing it. And! There are now 8 new beads on Etsy, and few more will come soon once I photograph them.

Here, have a look, handfuls and handfuls of them!

Bead Soup Blog Party Is Here!

It's that time again! Lori Anderson has been hard at work matching up 363 people for this one - wow! Check out the list here: Bead Soup Blog Party.

Remember how it works? She matches us up with a partner that she thinks may give us some challenges? And we exchange a focal and a pretty clasp, and then go to work adding our own beads and creating something new and hopefully different from what we normally make.

Well, this time, my partner is Linda Inhelder, of Must-Haves. She makes beautiful silver and beaded jewelry - really pretty things. Like this:



I'm sure whatever I send her will not be a challenge. Except that I just found out that she had an accident and will have one hand in a cast for some time. She probably won't be making anything for quite a bit. I'll be sending her something in the next couple of days, regardless. Wishing her a speedy recovery!

She managed to get my package out to me before all that, and it arrived last night - very pretty blues and greens and browns. Just my kind of colors, right? YES. Lovely. Baltic amber, dyed apatite, carved quartz flowers,and some fine silver pretties, some charms she made, a few circle links. And a few other goodies. I have NO IDEA what I'm going to do with it all. None!

My favorites are probably the amber and the little sea shell charm and silver links. But in my mind... I just can't see how to fit them together. But, I'm sure I'll figure it out. Definitely a challenge!

Here's the goods:







Thanks Linda! Get well soon! And thanks to Lori too - I know this is a huge undertaking for her - but so worth it - I hope!

Trickle Down Creativity

Or is it bubbling up? I'm not sure, I just know that it's back... let's see if I can hold on to it.

First of all, there was this glass fusing class that I signed my whole family up for. Susan Murphy was teaching her new glass fusing technique, along with another teacher, Brian, at Cascade Glass Art Center in Redmond, WA.

We learned how to decorate glass with powders and paints and stencils and a whole new world of possibilities opened up for me. I have to admit that I've always been a little snobby about stencils, except maybe for hand-made ones... but I now see the error of my ways. Stencils are my new best friend.

These photos show the pieces after the first day of class:





And here are the (mostly) finished pieces. I can still add more, and I might.







Interesting, right? So I debated and debated... do I want to get into something completely new, with all new supplies and materials? Finally it came down to this: This is something I can do with my son - he thinks his art passion is glass fusing. So I ordered hundreds of dollars worth of supplies. I guess I should show you what he made in class, check it out:









And then there's Frank's pieces - I really love this dodo bird with the flying eyeball and tiny wing. Frank's got some buried creativity in him too, just waiting to come out.



So... now we wait. There are a couple of slumped pieces that need to be picked up still. And paints and powders and stencils should be arriving any day now. But the muse had ideas and wanted to try them. SO I pulled out my acrylics and an old tree painting that I never felt was done, and a couple of stencils from Ben Franklin's... and started playing. And it was fun. Paint on canvas is much more instantly gratifying than glass, no kiln time... you see what you have withing minutes rather than hours or days.

Here is the tree painting I was never very happy with:



And what it looks like after messing around with it:







Let's see where this takes me...