I'm Back from my little "Blog Vacation"....

I thought it was time to wave a virtual 'hello' to everyone! I took a teeny little 'vacation' from my computer this past week to tend to gardening and working through my backlog of bench work deadlines. I've made lovely progress in the garden, chasing weeds, trimming last year's dead flower stalks and uncovering this year's new growth. It seems my two pink rugosa's did make it through the drought after all, and they are freshly trimmed and growing beautifully. My rosemary came through the cold winter, too. New green needles are peeking out out from the brown ones I feared were dead. And my viburnum bushes are in full fragrant bloom. This weekend I'm going to plant my broccoli, radishes, and maybe even my beans.

As for meeting all my jewelry deadlines, I'm almost there - here are a couple pictures of yesterday afternoon's work in progress, and a pile of pieces nearing completion. I think I will actually be fully caught up in a couple more days, even with my custom orders - yay!


While I've been working, I've had several new ideas that I just can't wait to start working on, and I've also been experimenting more with fusing copper, since I had a couple of little fused copper hoop earrings to make. Here's yesterday's little pile of fused copper circles - only two failures, probably because the joint wasn't flush enough. I wondered if using flux would make it fuse better, but I found that it actually seemed to make it worse, which is great because it saves a step.



Another thing I noticed is that if it looks like the joint is going to pull apart, if you pull away the heat it will often "swell" and fuse together just fine. Interesting.

I hope everyone who celebrates Easter had a wonderful holiday! Saturday Night at 1000 Markets and Sunday Morning Coffee and Etsy will be back with flying colors this weekend. I've found some wonderful goodies that I can't wait to show everyone. See you all soon!