Absentee Landord

Seems I am starting a trend.  Starting and then waiting a few months to post again.  I'll call this being an absentee landlord.  However, I am hoping to rectify this situation!  I will apologize for the quality of the pictures, they are from my phone.

January was a month o' crafts.  Maybe not all that productive in the craft creation, but certainly in the acquisition realm it was!  First weekend was a nice relaxing one.  I decided to go to a bead show hosted by the Baltimore Bead Society.  I was pleasantly surprised!  Not only were there plenty of fun shinies, but there were some really good quality jewelry makers.  Including a bunch who sold kits!  What a great way to learn a new craft, a small project with all the pieces!

Here's one kit, called a Halloween Dragonfly!

 This is my completed dragonfly.  I was a little unhappy with the quality, but probably just need some practice!

 

 

 Next my wonderful father delivered the sewing table he made for me!  It's a wonderfully cherry behemoth! Look at this glorious beast!

This is the cabinet closed.

This is the cabinet open!

Do you see that?  It's huge and made of glorious Pennsylvania cherry!  There's tons of drawers with room for my sewing machine and serger.  But, do you see the best part?  There's a hydraulic lift!  It is set to lock in two positions, one for my machine bed to be flush with the table and one for the machine to sit right on top of the table.  This just makes me happy.

I signed up for another class at the Patuxent Lapidary Guild (it's like an addiction to try all the stuff they have).  I'm learning to fling hot metal into a mold, aka casting.  This was a two part class and we made two rings in Argentium silver.  My first ring didn't turn out well, I have to quite a bit of clean up to do.  We are guessing the investment set up faster than it could make it all the way around the wax.  This caused some really funky problems.  The other ring was nice, the band needs some smoothing.  I'll post pictures later.

Final pieces of creativeness for January are working on pieces for the Patuxent Lapidary Guild sale in February and working on my Wicked Faire costumer.  First up is the jewelry (mostly cause there's pretty pictures).  I didn't end up making much really, but was I stressed out because of it.  Is it bad when your hobbies stress you out?

This is a test run of a wrap for a glass pendant made by one of the Guild members.  

I can't figure out the bail.

I call this Victorian Fire.

Finally, I've been trying to work on my Wicked Faire costume.  Part of it was practicing ruffling on my serger, which works GREAT for lighter fabric, but SUCKS for my heavy fabric

See, it looks great.  Not so with the other fabric.

I also made the bodice, but apparently did something wrong with the lining.  It was all puckered wrong.  I'm contemplating doing a rolled hem on it and just calling it a day.  I'll have to do a test run to see how it looks.

Well, if you made it this way, I'm impressed!  Hope to talk to you sooner than a month!