Peace and Quiet (for the time being)

Gustav is gone with no lasting scars except for the pine tree in my neighbor's yard. It looks really cool the way it just snapped in half and the green part is still attached and hanging down. It sort of looks like a closed pen knife. Now if we can only hold off Ike. The Cone of Doom is moving slowly westward so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

The weekend was nice and peaceful. The little red dog and the Pink Man actually sat together on the couch while I read the Sunday paper. What you can't see in the photo is Mimi walling her eyes at me in terror every few minutes. The little sweetie cat was in the window sill behind me biting my head when I took the photo.

Saturday was just a do-nothing day; I watched movies and read most of the day. Sunday, however, was a festival of jewelry making. There were some good old films on Turner Classic Movies it is was just too hot and humid to even think about staying outside for longer than 10 minutes at a time, so I sat down to the work table and began thinking. Not having any sort of pattern or even I idea of what I wanted to make, I started looking through the stash for inspiration. There were a few things (okay, quite a few) I had forgotten I had. The moss green freshwater pearls caught my eye and for the next couple of hours I was lost in my work. The result was this necklace with a rhinestone centerpiece. I've been trying to get a good photo of it but I'm having trouble with the lighting. I want to catch the glint off the crystals in the focal piece and the ones in the pearl strand and yet show the beautiful color of the pearls. This is the best one so far. I'm going to keep trying until I get it right.

I was on a roll after I finished the pearl necklace and in the next 4 hours I made three more necklaces using some of the beads I've shown in past posts - the blue and white porcelain and Russian serpentine. Let me mention at this point that I hate to do the fiddly work like putting jump-rings on charms or making wrapped loop components. I like laying out the design and picking the colors to put together. That said, I spent close to an hour putting jump-rings on tiny, gold-plated maple leaves for the serpentine necklace. It wouldn't have taken that much time if I hadn't kept jumping up to _____(insert name of activity here)________. Anything from laundry to brushing out the dog's ears to making a pitcher of tea gave me an excuse to put down the pliers and get up for a few minutes. I finally got it done and am pretty pleased with the results. Now for really hard part - taking the photographs. I'm going to make a start at it tonight but not really spend a lot of time on it.

The taller half is coming home Wednesday and I want to get the house nice and tidy (jeeze that sounds domestic...bleah!) so that he can trash it when he comes in with 9 weeks of laundry and assorted boat crap. The crew change was cancelled last week because of the Hurricane Gustav so he is more than ready to get off that boat this time. Well, come ahead on, Big Guy, the beer is cold and there are plenty of Bush's beans to keep you content. That is unless Ike changes his mind and we have to go back into hurricane mode. Keep your fingers crossed!