Goodbye 2010

May your new year

be filled with

joy and happiness.

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Happy New Year

Meanwhile, here at the Tombstone Winter Studio it really is winter. Thirty degrees, spitting show and sleet. I actually dug out a coat, hat, gloves and heavy woolly socks. I can't see the Huachuca Mountains under the clouds, but I'm sure they are snow capped by now.

Happy Christmas Eve

Happy Christmas

&

Best wishes for the Season

I had some black steel wire left over from my recent necklace projects. This quick idea came to me with my first cup of coffee. Little bits of wire, round nose pliers, bending, wrapping, spiraling around a toothpick and adding some orphaned crystals gave me a 15 min. completed project. Hang it on your Christmas tree, in a sunny window, or add it to a last moment gift package. Feel free to take this idea and run with it. Bend your own wire, use up some of those orphaned beads and have something just a little bit special to give to someone who might need a holiday lift.

As for me, I'm singing, "The weather is delightful, nothing frightful . . ."
Frost on the ground early on, bright sunshine, classical music on the radio, and no snow anywhere.

Have a happy, joyous Christmas.

Quiet AZ Sunday

The sun is out in full force and it's a cool 60 degrees here in Tombstone AZ today. It's sort of a puttering, lazy Sunday before the last of the Holiday rush. Had a nice brunch of home made waffles and NH maple syrup (local made by a friend).

I finished all of the components for this necklace while driving West last month. I'm finally getting around to putting it all together. It's been out & put away several times and I think it's really time to get it all done. Hopefully my table will stay clear of other projects long enough to finish up.


I confess . . . I collect old cookbooks and read them for fun. It seems that when you collect, you collect all sorts of odd things. Besides beads, I do cookbooks, returnable pie plates, balls, kitchen tinware, frosted glass shards, rusty metal and other interesting trivial bits & pieces. This book's title bothered me until I figured out that I'm used to seeing cooky spelled cookie. Somehow this seems appropriate reading for this time of the year. In fact, it has been back porch reading, in the warm sun today. Warm sun, rocking chair, good book and a glass of something cold - my idea of relaxing.

Last night the sunset was fantastic. Watching the sunsets from my studio window is one of my favorite pastimes here in the winter desert. Each one is better than the last. No clouds in the sky, so tonight may well be no color with just a flash of light as the sun goes down.

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It's a nice feeling to let Sunday develop as it will with no plans, lists, or ideas of gotta do. The best part is that I still have the rest of the day left to unfold as it will.

Take it to your beading table?

Bead Crocheters . . .

What would you think of having your bead crochet patterns on an Android Tablet? Being able to design on the same tablet and taking it to your beading table to string from either the graph or a stringing table? Yes, I know it isn't an "i-anything", but the 8" Android tablets are way less expensive and more in the price range of beaders like myself.

Do any of you have (or plan to have) an Android Tablet? If this project keeps going like it is right now, The programmer will be looking for someone other than myself, to do some testing. What I've seen so far impresses me as it's so quick & responsive and I can rotate the graph to see how things line up. I can't wait to see how the stringing table, with the working line highlighted, looks. I'm excited and never realized something like this might be on my wish list. For heavens sake, I don't even use a cell phone.

If you want me to get back in touch with you, you'll need to give me your email or other way to contact you.

Oh, and another thought:
. . . other nice thing is that you can put other beading patterns on this if they are PDF's. This tablet (sigh, the programmer's, not mine) has the full content of "Bead Crochet Ropes" & "Triangular Bead Crochet Ropes" on it in PDF format and I can scroll through the pages with a flick of a finger. Could I even think about getting rid of my piles and piles of paper patterns?