Radio - or more accurately Cyber - Silence - Oops!

Hey there! Remember me? The summer got really busy, really quickly and I’ve been absent from cyberspace. I can give you lots of reasons. We had more soil put in the garden area. That was great and necessary, but it came with grass seed; so DAYS of pulling and hoeing. Then lots of rain, which we were blessed to have, but necessitated pulling weeds in the round pen for more DAYS. Oh, and there’s the little matter of Mushin finding the top of my right foot with the bottom of his right hind. It was two months later when an x-ray showed a broken metatarsal in the process of healing. Hmmm....

The remaining peach tree yielded a decent crop. I said thank you and proceeded to replace it and the one we lost a couple of years ago. Now the apple trees . . . just WOW!  We’ve NEVER had this abundant a crop. I’ve been processing apples for a month and that just finishes one of two trees. We also had a new fescue yard put in this season. Hubby Bob has worked very hard to get it established and the effort was well worth it. Oh, and the veggie garden is in full production, so there’s that to enjoy and preserve.

I finally got to do a show ‘in person’ - the Southwest Music Summer Exhibition in San Antonio - and it was wonderfully fun & successful.

Remember the blog about my mother? Well, we got to celebrate her 89th birthday with her - a very special time.

We’re doing a show in Ruidoso, NM the end of this month and I’m busy getting items ready for that event.

In other words, life happened, but my nose is now a bit above water, sooo . . .

You get a link to all the newbies I’ve been creating! I found some absolutely gorgeous cloisonné beads for striking sets in blue and also red. And large hole freshwater pearls found their way to leather slider bracelets. There are, of course, pearls sets and crystal sets, bracelets, earrings, and even a hatband (more of those in the process of being made)!

I thought you might be interested in a cursory discussion about cloisonné since I mentioned it above. The word itself is French but the art of creating it is ancient and said to have been first developed in the Near East as early as 3000 BC according to Wikipedia. Colored material ranging from gems to glass to enamel are separated by thin strips of silver or gold that stay exposed in the final item. Modern cloisonné most often uses enamel. In 1999, Bob was head of a People to People delegation of music educators to China. Because I was family AND a music educator, I went. It was an incredible trip and one of the fun places we were able to visit was a cloisonné factory. Below is one of the photos taken there. It was a treat to watch them work.