Hello there Muse, it's been a while

I've been in a creative slump for a few months. Not really inspired to make anything new and list it in my Etsy shop. Part of this is because the stuff isn't selling that fast and I have a good inventory of my bracelets, so don't feel compelled to make more of those. I think what I need there is to get more advertising, and I'm working on that.

Since I got my hair cut short, I've been wearing earrings more, and it seems that the earrings I have are lovely, but I want some larger pairs. Hey, I can make some myself, right? Sure. So I hopped on Pinterest and found a few things I liked (here is the link to that Pinterest board if you want the original sources):

Making my own jump rings used to intimidate me, but my skills are a little better and I think I could do the above design with a combo of vintage buttons and my polymer clay buttons. 

I really like these. They induced a mild forehead-smacking moment where I said, why don't I make my clay buttons really thin (and therefore just decorative for this purpose) and then I can stack them like this in cool colors and textures? It's a very simple design, and I need a little file to make the earring wires out of the wire I have, but it's totally doable. 

So I've got some ideas that I'll try tomorrow between bouts of paint scraping, and over the weekend. I'm finally seeing progress on removing the old peeling paint from the porch and am almost ready to sand it, wash it and paint it again. I will be so very glad when it's over. It (speaking of forehead smacking moments) occurred to me that if the paint was hard to remove in a few spots, it's probably not going anywhere and could be painted over with the super-duper thick deck miracle paint I saw advertised at the orange home store. 

And tomorrow Mr W and I will go see the fireworks. Last year they were cancelled because it was so dry and we had just gotten over the large fire in the area. Well, they were postponed, but I then forgot about it until we heard the booms from the house on Labor Day. My dear son is going off to sleepover camp next week, and I dropped a bunch of money yesterday at the gear shop and got him a decent pair of hiking boots, as well as some good socks and a headlamp. The camp is only about an hour away, but they are off the grid, so if it were me, I'd want a good headlamp with extra batteries for sure :-)

Finally, I received the square foot samples of the Cambria countertops and as I suspected, the Waterford is truly lovely. On a total whim, and because like a blue jay or crow I am attracted to shiny things, I impulsively ordered a sample of Parys:

I got it out of the box and said, "Ooooooohhhhh. It's so pretty." One nice thing about Cambria is that it's all the same price, so the sparkly ones don't cost more. Parys is like Waterford in that they've got the same color of blue chips, except Parys has more. They are iridescent and not at all overwhelming or over the top as I had thought they would be. There isn't any tan in this at all, but it goes fine with the maple cabinets and the grey actually matches the "white" in the multicolored glass tile (click on the Waterford link above to see that if you'd like). So it's either Waterford of Parys and both are really nice. 

Hope your holiday is grand!