A Little Help Please...

I needed some help with my PMC work and also wanted to learn a couple of new techniques. Who to turn to?! Erin from Dragonfly Beads in Manlius, of course! I've taken a few courses from Erin now and it's always a pleasure to go to her shop and pick her brain. It was her shop that I got all the beautiful turquoise from at a trunk sale she had.

Here is the lentil bead that Erin helped me make. I just finished sanding it this morning. It's so pretty and fun! Now the decision is whether to antique it. I think I will in order to highlight the flowers. I can always sand it all off again (ugh).

What about the ring? Well, I made this a while ago however it looked quite different then. To be frank, it was downright ugly. It had the garnet in the middle but a different surround that I had textured and three round pieces on either side. I had also antiqued it. It looked like some goth piece of poo.

It's not perfect but it is miles better than it was. I talked to Erin at her trunk show about what we could do with it and she gave me a couple of options: add a couple more embellishments or saw off what I didn't like. Guess which option I chose. Erin was too nice to say the original was ugly but I know she was just being nice.

Erin is a great teacher. She taught me a few tricks and made me realize that I knew more about working with PMC than I thought I did. She even asked me if I had bought the ring blank. Nope, made it my very self, first time too. (Yes, that was a very blatant pat on the back.)

For the Love of Turquoise!

Take a gander at my latest purchases! Aren't these beauties?! I went to a trunk sale yesterday and sold my first born son in order to get these. (Okay, so I exaggerate. It just took my left arm.) A guy from the Southwest stops in at various bead stores, as well as bead shows I believe, and opens up boxes and boxes and boxes of bead strands to sell.

The top left and center picture show all four strands that I bought. Starting with the upper right-hand picture and going clockwise are green pebble/potato turquoise beads I think he said these were from Arizona (it was really hard to keep them all straight as I was asking about a lot of different strands), Kingman turquoise pebbles and a strand of chunky, graduated beads from China. These are unbelievable! They're all about 4-5mm thick and range from 13-21cm wide. I think I'm going to have to sell at least 1/2 of this strand in order to get part of my left arm back. There is also a strand of uniform rondelle/disk beads that are from Arizona and are similar to Carico Lake turquoise (in the picture of all the strands). All of these beads have been stabilized and are natural color!!

This guy was really interesting to talk to. He talked about a mask that had been found in Mexico that contained turquoise from Kingman, AZ. He also told me about some ancient digging sticks found in an unearthed section of the Kingman mine. Truth or lore, who knows. It was entertaining to listen to. Well, that was my adventure for this weekend. Now to make something with all my pretties...