Back in the Saddle Again

Well, sort of.

Still hurts, but nowhere near as badly as it did last week. I can get vertical without screaming. Woohoo! Progress!

In crabby news (and I mean the actual hermit crabs - not my recently crabby disposition): We completely cleaned out the tank a week ago and in the process, discovered that all THREE crabs had molted. I found a few remnants of their previous skins (they eat most of the shed skin in order to reabsorb the nutrients in it) and all three of them have newly shiny black tips to all their legs. The black color will wear off over time as the leg tips get worn down from climbing and digging, etc.

They've been extremely active since then. Climbing into all sorts of weird places in the crabitat and Talkie (the red one) has been burying himself deep into the sand every morning and then emerging at night. Summers (the green one...well, not any more) switched shells, too! A couple of days ago, he switched himself back into the striped shell that so interested him back when we first got the crabs. So far, he's staying put, but I wouldn't be surprised to see him get back into the green shell. We'll have to wait and see.

And now to get caught up on stuff I had intended to post last week.

I actually got something done in time for the ABS Challenge in June...or so I thought! I stayed up til midnight on the 29th to finish it so I could submit it to the Flickr group the next day, but they have never approved it so it doesn't appear on the Flickr site. I was a bit annoyed because I wouldn't have stayed up so late if I'd known it wouldn't get posted, but whatever.

I'll post it here instead. The inspiration for the June Challenge was a Toulouse Lautrec painting which you can see here.

The dancer's skirt in the painting looked so much like a flower to me that I just had to use some of my Lucite flowers in this piece.

I wire-wrapped the flowers, leaves and some gunmetal round beads to a piece of metal filigree and then attached jump rings to turn this piece into a pendant.

Accent beads are dyed faceted pink quartz rondelles, gunmetal floral teardrop beads and some hand-dyed orange lucite flowers and leaves. I attached everything to some large-link gunmetal chain. I liked the contrast of the feminine flowers and color scheme with the toughness of the dark chain. The gunmetal also picks up the black accents in the painting.

I call it "Flower Dancer."

I attempted to get caught up yesterday on posting in both of my Etsy shops so there's new jewelry at SilverParrot and new beads at BeResinable. Still not quite done so expect more new stuff tonight (she said hopefully). Now that most of my jewelry is back safely from the magazines, I can get it into the shop finally!

Lastly, I got a resin pour done this weekend so expect more beads later this week after I get them all photographed! The obsession must be winding down a bit because I actually went a whole week without making new resin stuff.

Well, the back injury may have had something to do with that LOL!

I think that's it for today. Hope everyone had a good weekend!

KJ