Glass bead: torso hand made by Tammy Vitale from French Vanilla glass, coe 104, 1 inch tall

I need a better camera.  Mine doesn't do these closeups very well, but you get the picture.  After failing miserably the night before last, I went back in last night focused.  And I got a torso bead that I am happy with! 

I'm still having problems with pretty ends on my round beads – I get one nice end and one not so nice.  Hopefully my class at Virtrum Studios this coming weekend will help with that.

Yesterday I went to Herons Way Gallery and learned how to mound pictures onto glass and then seal it all with supplies you use in stained glass work:  a kind of copper foil, which you smooth out, paint with flux, and then cover with solder and attach a jump ring.  Click over to the Gallery's web site (this will only be up through the end of February 09 so hurry on over…I will try to find websites for these gals)to see the very cool bracelets you could make yesterday, courtesy of the Three Cool Chicks, jewelry makers all, who have the show there this month (Here's Jodi Flood)

Last Thursday I spent about 4 hours with my bead mentor, Sue Page.  She is the one who showed me how, again, to make the torso and we went over making nice ends, again (and obviously I still don't have it).  She is the  essence of patience and generosity.  Every one should have such a gift in their life!

Last Friday I made a pretty little ring at the Bead Boutique class.  A CZ amethyst set in silver.  Very simple, really.  And so it was very fun. (scroll down all the way to the bottom, next to last class to see an example.  I, by the way, took the photos!  =])

As you can see, I have been out learning new things, which is perfectly in tune for my word for the year: "discovery."

thought for the day:  As e.e. cummings once wrote, "it takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."  After bowing to the wind, being blown into one thing and another, – even if they were successful and rewarding – in 2005 I began to right myself, stick my roots deeper into earth, resist the wind, tell my own story, not the one I felt I should tell, not the books others wanted me to write, but my very own.

If I'm honest with myself, I told the group, I have play acted through my professional life – knowing it wasn't what I truly needed to be doing…I was successful by anyone's measure, except by my own…And now, ironically, I am the most successful by my own internal measure, and the least successful by anyone else's.  It is a good lesson for me, to be sitting at both the top and bottom of Maslow's hierarchy at the very same time, saying no to financial gain that is at the cost of the Self I have found.  There is no other time for me to write but now.  Patty Digh, Life is a Verb