The kitten is diligently watching the tumbler to make sure the barrels aren’t leaking. What a good kitten. Also, I need to vacuum. 

o/~ “Then you may take me to the fair, if you do all the things you promise. In fact, my heart would break should you not take me to the fair…” -Camelot

 

I’ll be at the Solstice on Grand art fair tomorrow in Chippewa Falls, WI. So don’t break your lady’s heart; take her to the fair! Now if you’ll excuse me, I shall toddle off to my soft warm bed. My alarm’s set for 3.

Dome of the roof of the Assembly chamber in the state Capitol building.

Guess how much wire it took to make this bad boy. Then triple it…

 

Look at me, actually posting on time! Mostly because I’m going to be gone all day, at Littlest Sis’s graduation (my baby sis is going to be a lawyer. I don’t know if I should be proud or disgusted). This is actually an older bracelet, from a couple of months ago. I call it my “Options” cuff, because it’s both braided and woven (if you have too many options, you do a bit of everything, and hopefully it’ll turn out?). Also because I was studying financial derivatives at the time – an option is a financial instrument where you pay a small premium now and then at a given time, you have the option to buy or sell your stock at a predetermined price, no matter what the current price of the stock is. Por ejemplo, let’s say you’re buying a Hummer in three months and you’ll want to stock up on oil. You want to buy three barrels of oil in three months, but you don’t want to pay more than $100/barrel for it. So you’d find someone willing to sell you an option for a couple of dollars saying that in three months, if the price of oil is above $100/barrel, they’ll still sell it to you for $100. So if the price of oil spikes at $130 just before Labor Day, you can exercise your option and buy it at $100. But if the price of oil stays steady at $88.50, you don’t use your option and you buy the oil at $88.50.

*crickets*

Sorry. Here’s another picture, as recompense:

Just hangin’ out… Ha! I crack myself up!

(Sorry, no picture. The pictures I took at the show all suck)

Last Sunday was the Marshfield Art Fair, my first fair of the year, the second fair since my “hard reset,” and my first actual art fair. There is a difference between an “art fair” and a “craft fair,” and it’s more than the occasional superfluous e on the end of the word “faire.”

Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to look around and see much of the other booths, since I was all by my lonesome. But there were a fair number of other jewelrymakers in my aisle, and I got to shoot the breeze a little bit towards the end, when everyone was just waiting to pack up.

And I got sales, Huzzah! I didn’t make a lot, but I made back the booth fee and the cost of gas, and had enough to get supper on the way home. I also got lots of compliments, which I know aren’t the same as sales, but I’m still new enough to really appreciate them.

Now the annoying part. I was right next to a Hmong art booth. There’s a fairly sizeable Hmong population up here in the central Wisconsin area, and the Hmong textiles booth is ubiquitous at just about every art or craft fair around here, no matter what. They’re all the same: plastic bins covered with sheets turn into low tables covered with stuffed animals, snakes, etc. for the kids, and tons of embroidered purses, jackets and quilts hanging along the sides of the booth. Now, I could go off on my whole buy/sell rant, but for now I’ll just say that being next to that booth was not the windfall one might expect. Lots of parents speed-walking their kids past me to get them a safe distance away from all those $5 stuffed snakes and unicorns. Also, a good third to a half of the people entering my booth were just wanting a better look at the intricately embroidered $20 tote bags hanging off the side of my neighbor’s booth.

Marshfield went well. I’ll talk more about it tomorrow. For now, I’ll just say that while I’m glad that I can still pull a full day off on only two hours’ sleep, I’m still recovering. So I will toddle off to my much-needed and much-deserved rest. G’night, Splendorians!

 

Splendorians. I think I like that.

I think I’ve come up with a new collective noun. A gaggle of geese, a pride of lions,

 

Bubbly earrings, in copper and brass.

 

A champagne glass of earrings.

First art fair since what I call my “hard reset”, and I’m behind. You may notice that my To Do list above doesn’t include “put in a regular 40-hour work week at that day job people keep telling you not to quit” or “be plagued with crippling self-doubt and consider hiding under the bed until next year sometime.” I ran out of room on my note card, but rest assured, I will not forget about them!

So if you’re in central Wisconsin, come up/down/over to the Marshfield Art Fair on Sunday! Come to buy stuff, to meet the especially charming and witty person behind Motley Splendor, or just to see if I can pull this off…

Warning: Some of the pictures in this post are a little squicky. If you have a sensitive stomach, or just had eggs for breakfast, you might want to skip this post. Sorry.

 

Remember the necklace in this post? Well, I oxidized it. I put it in a canning jar with a hard-boiled egg and left it. For a week. Note to self: Do not try to oxidize anything for a week.

Ick ick ick. I opened the jar up outside, left it out there until the stench was gone, then dumped out the egg and washed everything – the jar, the necklace, my hands – about twenty times. And do you want to know the worst part? Not a whole lot of change:

Before Oxidation

After oxidation. Yes, I can totally see the difference! [/sarcasm]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am very unhappy.

Just hanging out…

 

The woven bands at the bottom have a needlepoint stitch called Florentine stitch, so I call these earrings Flossie (Flossie is a diminutive of the name Florence). Also because the small wires make you remember to floss?

 

Ingredients: Sterling silver wire (I think I used 20 and 28 gauge for the woven bit), blue topaz faceted rondelles (from Earth Bazaar, before they went belly-up), sterling silver leverbacks. Measurements: 1 7/8″ long from top of leverback to base, 1 1/4″ from bottom of leverback to base of earring. 1 3/16″ across widest part of base.