Monday is NOT my Funday

Unless it's a 3-Day weekend. C'mon, Memorial Day!!

Thanks everyone for the BP comments on Friday! It really means a lot to me when you all take the time to post a comment - even if it's just a couple of words. Not only is it just nice to hear everyone's "voice" and get feedback, but it also really tells me what my audience likes (and therefore I should do more of it) or loathes (which I should stop doing immediately and also go eat chocolate until I feel better) so it's really important.

So, thank you, thank you, thank you! I love comments!!

Speaking of which, if anyone knows EB from EB Bead and Metalworks, can you please give her a shout and let her know she won the contest last week? I want to get her package in the mail to her.

And now for the good stuff! I made Bead Soup this weekend! And okay, yeah, so it was supposed to be soup like a week ago or so, but hey, y'know, busy and stuff. Fortunately, my fantastic swap partner, Juli Cannon, was very understanding. Turns out her soup took longer to simmer than she expected, too, so we are all good. Check out her blog today if you want to see what she sent me.

I'm still trying to decide if I want to go look and know...or if I want to be surprised.

In the meantime, here's what I put together for her:

I went to the far edge of the beading zone with this incredible raku pendant and some accompanying raku beads and bead caps. These came from different artists, but they have a lot of the same colors in the finish and could be used together in one project OR parceled out separately between several projects. I bought the pendant from a vendor called Allene who reps for several clay, ceramic and lampwork artists, but I stupidly forgot to make a note of the actual artist's name. The large raku rounds and bead caps came from Wondrous Strange on Etsy.

Then I started to put together some secondary items that I thought would work well with the colors in the raku:

Dyed lava stones in sage green and powder blue. The green is a dead match for the green in the pendant. The blue? Well, not so much, but they could be great in a separate design. I just liked the colors and texture on these.

I think I mentioned that my local arts and crafts store, Tall Mouse, is going out of business? They started their liquidation sale this weekend. It's so sad - they were a great competitor/complement to the local Michael's because they carried different stock. But, the upside is that everything was hugely marked down so my Soup Buddy benefits as a result because I helped clean out the bead section! I just grabbed multiple strands of everything I liked - one for me and one for her. Plus, I thought these colors would look great with the raku beads.

Okay, I know this looks weird after the softer colors in the earlier pictures, but go with me here. When you hold the raku beads up to the light and turn them different ways you get flashes of some of these deeper colors - like cobalt, gold and rose copper. So, I'm throwing in a few strands in those colors from my stash in case my partner is not up for the pastel thing and wants to pick out some of the bolder stuff. Or, again, these can be used in a different project.

There's more stuff, too. A couple of toggle clasps in different metals, some of my Be Resinable creations and other goodies. I didn't photo everything because I didn't want to ruin the surprise completely.

I know this soup is a little Gemini-ish (split personality and all), but hey, that's me. Plus, I like the idea of being able to get more than one design out of it (sort of like freezing the leftover soup and saving it for another day).

Fingers crossed that my Soup Buddy does not totally hate it (please, please, please don't hate it LOL)!

KJ