Work Day!

Well, the 100 plus degree weather here in Portland finally forced me to stay home and work today! The last two days I’ve spent at my friend’s parent’s house working away getting a new ceiling sanded, then painted, along with the walls, and waxing the floor. We’ve been working on their house for about five weeks now, and got them to head to the beach for the last couple days so we could really push through those last time consuming bits! While I have loved working on that project, its been consuming most of my time! Today it was deemed to hot to work there anymore, so I got a much needed day at home. The air conditioner has been blasting steadily all day, even though it is set to a pretty high 78 degrees. Whew! When its hot here, its hot!

I’ve been taking advantage of the unexpected day off working away in my studio, and finally took a break to rest my tired fingers (filing and sanding is hard on them) and take some pictures of whats been going on lately! And some of them are shown below:

Okay, so I didn’t make these two felted earrings today, but I did clean up the pictures in photoshop just now! I will be teaching a class on felted earrings in October at Collage on Woodstock, but more about that later. Or go to the DIYlounge wesite and look them up! Lots of other fun classes too.

Below are a few of my new teeny tiny (around a half inch) charm pendants. I am in love with them, and so it seems, are my customers at the Saturday Market. I’ve gotten into the nasty habit of selling them before I get pictures taken, so they haven’t made it onto my website, and they need to! I’d be happy to take custom orders if anyone is interested… They retail in the $32 to $42 range, very reasonable…

I like ‘em, hope you do to! Here’s hoping the heat wave breaks in the next few days, I don’t want to die of heat stroke at the Saturday Market!

jewelry photo shoot almost derailed by chickens!

So this photo shoot all started because I’m currently in e-mail talks with a representative company that is bringing Japanese Craft goods to America, and in 2009 will be bringing American goods to Japan. They are trying out a few companies that are interested right now though, by bringing over (or sending, I’m not real sure) some samples and catalogs and whatnot and showing them around to some of the stores they are already working with over there. They think my stuff would go over well there , and heck, so do I! I sell lots of my jewelry to adorable little Japanese exchange students and tourists.

Shawn (the guy I’m working with) wanted some good photos of what I make, and so I decided to try my hand at a front yard photo shoot, because I am tired of how things look just scanned on my scanner. They look alright, but it doesn’t show how they hang, just how they look flat, which is sometimes not a good way to show them. It was sunny this morning, with clouds coming in fast, so I knew it was now or never, cause who knows when it will be sunny again in March in Portland!

Here are a few pictures of how a photo shoot goes when you also have chickens out and about. They are social birds, and curious, and well, they couldn’t figure out what I was doing. So they had to follow me around the yard to figure it out. I don’t think they ever got it, but they did get a couple chances to sit on me (thanks Martha) and peck at the shiny things I was dangling from various bushes around the yard. Here are some shots of the girls being helpful:

You can see Martha in the background here. This is right before she started pecking at them, and then sat on my shoulder.Here are the rest of the girls swooping in on my photo shoot.
Heres Henrietta and Prudence pruning themselves right next to me whilst I take pictures.
And an action shot of Martha pecking my poor Octopus pendant!
And this is what that Octopus pendant looks like up close and on a leaf where the girls can’t find it!

I’ll post tomorrow with more photos from the shoot. It went really well I think. I may do all my photo shoots in my yard! If you use your plants for photo shoots, can you write them off as props….?