Century giveaway - my 100th sale to be!

OK - baby steps here....deep breath!  I am approaching my one hundredth sale in my Etsy shop (I am at 96 today) and I want to celebrate that number 100 when it happens because there was a time when I thought it would NEVER happen.  Not so long ago, I was stuck at 13 sales.  It didn't seem to matter what I did, 13 was my number and that was that.  A big thanks to all my buyers, past and future, for getting me past 13. 

My 100th customer will also get this rosette pendant (which has never been in my shop).  Now, if my 100th customer is a beadophile, I'm pretty sure I can do a bead grouping rather than the pendant!  I actually can't believe I 'm almost there.....

Great Tuesday, everyone!

Another unexpectedly wonderful day

Mother's day was good, now Tuesday was excellent!  What next, pray tell!

Half way through the morning I clued in to the fact that Cynthia Tinapple had featured my newest beads on Polymer Clay Daily - here, if you don't know her site.

Now, when you are learning, a site like this is an incredibly valuable and instant resource for all things polymer.  When I am feeling lazy or lacking inspiration, I go back through her archives and just enjoy it all, with open mind, soaking it in, marvelling at people's inventiveness and ingenuity, and getting excited all over again AND - this is the big thing - making connections about techniques and aesthetic decisions that I probably missed the first time around because I was too new to the medium.  So, yes, it's an honour to be part of that!  Thank you, Cynthia! 

Of course, I don't just look at polymer sites.  Lately, I've been looking at a lot of felt artists and I always check out glass because I was a glass artist and it's a habit...but I'm going to leave you with a couple of photos of felt artist Andrea Graham's work, (she's a friend of a friend whose work I've just discovered) just because sometimes it's good to look in other places and her work is luminous and the forms just send me!

You can find her website here, and her blog here!

The end of my (mother's) day

We don't make much fuss over Mother's day in our family - my husband and I call our mothers and do the phone thing.  Every family has not its traditions, I guess.  We went for a beautiful hike in Parc de la Gatineau, a 10 kilometre hike with some very strenuous climbing.  There was fresh snow on all the greenery and trillium flowers - it was quite strange, but lovely and most unusual.  Sorry, no photos because I forgot the camera.

So Mother's day might have passed unremarked, except that this appeared on my bedside table in the evening.  It made me cry a little - such a wonderful thing to get from your almost 13 year old ( in two weeks).  I can't help but post it.

Can't help but feel that the teen years hold a lot of promise...enjoy them!