Liver of Sulfur, Dancing at the Movies, Family Photo Albums, Milk

Milk

Monica and I drink non-fat milk. We like it. We’re used to it. I had no idea how “used to it” I was until this week. I bought milk, but they didn’t have non-fat so I got low-fat. Wow… I felt like I was drinking cream. It’s MASSIVELY different from non-fat. After a few days of it in my cereal, however, I’m finding myself a little too fond of it. Heh. Maybe I’ll get it once in a while just for fun.


Family Photo Albums

I was looking through old family photo albums and noticed something. In every other photo of my brother, starting as early as age six (maybe even younger), he’s dressed in some kind of costume and pretending to be somebody or something. He’s in his early 40’s now and he’s an actor. We should have all seen this coming.

So I started to look for signs of me and my natural fate. Hm… nothing. Well, nothing as obvious as my brother’s anyway. Although there weren’t any photos of all the times I played with the boxes of treasures my mom would let me dig through (buttons, old jewelry, ect), there was a photo of me playing with a chemistry set I received as a Christmas present once. I loved that thing. :-)

If you look back at your childhood photos, can you see that there was something way back then that would lead you to what/who you are now?


Dancing at the Movies

The embedding option for this YouTube video is disabled, but if you click on this link you’ll be taken to a video of dancing clips from various movies. I enjoyed it. :-)



Liver of Sulfur

And here are some AWESOME photos of jewelry and patina recipes by Holly Gage.





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The Picasso Story, Epoxy Resin Tutorial, Bonnie’s Best Art Tools, New Jewelry Listings

Well, here we are again. :-)


New Listings

These are only in my website store so far (click a photo for more info)…

JINGLE BALI (yep… all sterling silver!)


TIGRIS (bronze metal clay)


BLOWING BUBBLES


COILS


I may have some simple Swarovski creations coming up soon. Taking the Swarks and tools to Mom’s house tomorrow and I can usually yap and create at the same time.

The eBay sale is finished and it’s always fun because I get to see some of my regular customers, some of my old customers, and I get to meet new customers. And they’re all so freakin’ nice!



Kudos

I want to give a big shout out to Bonnie’s Best Art Tools.

A couple months ago I placed my first ever order with them. Anyway, I just wanted to say that THEY provide the kind of customer service I would love to see in all vendors I deal with.

Because I don’t want them inundated with similar requests, I won’t go into the details of my question to them but they didn’t hesitate to accommodate me.

My hat’s off to you, people at Bonnie’s Best… and I hope I’ve turned some customers your way.


Resin

Here’s a nice online tutorial showing some ins and outs of using two-part epoxy resin.


Misc

Heard a news story earlier this week in which a baby bassinet was recalled because "if not assembled correctly it may collapse". Now... Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't that be the case with every baby bassinet?


Don’t You Love This Story

“The famous Pablo Picasso was at a party. A woman recognized him and approached the Master. She asked, “Will you create a sketch for me?” Picasso agreed, and, as he pulled out his sketchpad, asked her for a subject. “A bird in a tree will do,” she responded. So Picasso spent about a five minutes doing what Picasso does on the sketchpad. When finished, he ripped the sketch off the pad, handed it to the woman and said, “That will be $10,000.” The woman was floored. “Ten thousand dollars! Why, it only took you five minutes to draw that sketch!” To which, Picasso replied, “No, madam. That sketch took me thirty years.”

Camera Settings, Spinner Ring Tutorial, Etsy Seller Handbook, Turning Beads into Cabs, Copyrighting Photos

Copyrighting Photos

If you’ve visited jewelry/bead forums for any length of time, you know the subject of “stolen photos” comes up every now and again.

Here’s an article about copyrighting photographs that I found rather interesting.

I used to put a watermark (and at times just a copyright notice) on every one of my jewelry photos. I don’t bother anymore. I do, however, think a watermark on certain things does make sense. If I were selling 2-dimensional artwork (photography prints, oil paintings, etc), then I would add a watermark.


Turning Beads into Cabs

Have you seen this tutorial on “Turning Beads into Cabs”? I’d like to try it. If you do, send me your photos. I’ll post ‘em!


Etsy Seller Handbook

If you sell on Etsy, this article has some nice ins and outs and useful tips.


Spinner Ring Tutorial

I love spinner rings. Would love to try making one someday. Here’s an article that’s not overly detail-oriented, but it could definitely be a helpful if you want to try your hand at this technique.


Dinner

Tonight’s dinner was cod with modified beurre blanc sauce, pesto spaghetti, and grilled crookneck squash. When I saw that beurre blanc calls for 7 oz of butter (that’s 1¾ sticks!!!), I decided to change it up a bit. Instead of heavy cream, I used non-fat plain yogurt. And instead of 14 tablespoons of butter, I used three tablespoons and the juice of one lemon.


Camera Settings

So my brilliant idea for the day was to try out different settings on my camera, taking notes the whole time, and then compare the photos so really pinpoint how I want to set up my camera for jewelry photos.

Well Photoshop 7 isn’t compatible with Windows 7, and I was getting frustrated with the inability of being able to do certain things in my photo-editing software when my monitor is set-up for the highest resolution, so I had to change it back. But in order for the change to lower resolution, my computer had to log me off and reboot. OMG! Why did WORD not autosave (yes, I have it configured to autosave) the document with all my notes?! Ggggrrr!!! So… 43 shots wasted. Start over.

So far I’ve covered ISO, shutter speed, aperture, metering, white balance and macro vs super macro (something fairly interesting there).

But my day is done now. I’ll continue this… Wednesday I guess (Monday is SRAJD applications and Tuesday is hockey).


Hockey

The kids had a good day today. Actually, first… Gabe’s team won last night (Gabe stopped all five shots in the shootout). They won again today. Yay! Monica’s team won today too (a really important game). Mon was in net and played really well. Five more days until Chicago.


Designs

For some (most) of my upcoming jewelry creations, I need to hit the sketchbooks. I hope to have some new metal designs in a couple of weeks. Lots to do in life right now, so jewelry creating is taking a back seat… but hopefully that’s only temporary.



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Dinner and Jewelry Sale

MEALS


Dinner is Roast Chicken and Sweet Potatoes Recipe and Quinoa Black Bean Salad. It’s my first time cooking sweet potatoes. Oh, and I used chicken fillets rather than bone-in breasts.


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PNP Instructions, Another DIY Photographer’s Light Box, PayPal Resolving Issues

PayPal… on the ball!

This week I received two emails from PayPal asking me to fill out a survey regarding my recent trouble ticket filed with them. Normally, I just delete these spasm, but in these emails they referred to me by name, rather than “Dear Customer”.

So I called PayPal and said, “I haven’t called you guys in many months for anything, so why am I receiving a notice that I recently submitted a trouble ticket?”

The guy looked up the number referenced in the email. Turns out this is a response to a trouble ticket I filed… last March. Ha ha ha! Way to scare the heck out of your customers! I thought someone hacked my account.


Photographer’s Light Box

Another great DIY (do-it-yourself) photo light tent tutorial.


PNP Instructions

For those into metal etching, if you haven’t tried PNP (press-n-peel) paper yet… you may want to consider experimenting with it. You can get some pretty precise designs using it. Here is a page with some specific directions.



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