Expand-o-rama

No, not my waistband after Thanksgiving, although I did have two full meals in the space of three hours on Thursday. I’ve added two new shops and a show to my portfolio.

Blush Boutique in Cleveland Heights is now carrying a selection of my sterling silver and etched copper pendants. Blush is a great little shop on Coventry Road, just a few doors down from Mint Cafe. They have a lovely collection of clothing and accessories for women.

Gestures Gift Shop & Gallery in Rocky River also has sterling silver and etched copper pendants, as well as sterling silver earrings. Gestures features work by a large number of local artists — there’s something for everyone.

Lampwork artist Jen Pitts of the Velvet Box and I are teaming up once again for an open house on Friday, December 10. Jen will be opening her new studio in Berea to show hundreds of handmade artisan glass beads that fit most popular collectible bead bracelets, including Pandora, Troll, Chamilla, Biagi, and more. I’ll have several dozen new pieces in my existing lines and will also be debuting my newest line of enamel work. There will be demos and food and fun people to meet and mingle with. If you’re on Facebook, please RSVP on the Facebook event page, and feel free to invite your friends. RSVPs are not necessary to come, but they help us get a better idea of how many people to expect for planning purposes.

Showtime!

My denial of the change of season (snow last night!) hasn’t prevented the days and weeks from continuing their march forward, and here it is, the start of show season.

I’m starting out tonight with a trunk show with several other artists (Brenda Traffis, Deb Perry, Linda Hahn, and Sandy Cseplo) at Bead Q in Chagrin Falls.

Sunday is the Beachwood Arts Council Holiday Craft Show, a new one for me.

Next Saturday is Basket of Treasures in Westlake. This is my second year for this show, and it’s a huge one.

Friday after Thanksgiving is late night Big Box Detox at Blush Boutique on Coventry. I’ll be there starting at 9 p.m. (yes, that late) with Kathy of Smashing and Chris of Copper Leaf Studios and a few others. We’ll be there until midnight or so.

Early December has a couple of private events, then I wrap it all up with the mother of all shows, the Cleveland Handmade Last Minute Market on December 18, the Saturday before Christmas, at the Screw Factory in Lakewood. If you live in the Cleveland area, you don’t want to miss this one. Last year we had a couple thousand people through the doors. It was busy all day, and it was a great atmosphere and a great time.

Hope to see you out at a show this season!

Rocky River Fall Arts Festival

Today is a bit of a rush getting everything ready for the Rocky River Fall Arts Festival tomorrow. It was a great show for me last year, so I’m looking forward to doing it again.

I have a number of new etched copper pieces and stamped sterling silver pieces to bring with me, and I’m hoping to get a chance to finish up a few other pieces this afternoon.

This show will be the last hurrah for a number of older styles of chunky bracelets, too. They’ll be $10 off tomorrow, and anything left over will be taken apart and reworked into new pieces in the future.

If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll stop by and say hello. My tent will be close to Stino da Napoli again (and I’m hoping this time I’ll be bright enough to remember to order some takeout as I’m breaking down).

Friday? Really?

This week has been a bit of time out of time. For the first time in many, many months, I’ve had no editing projects in house — I was able to wrap up one a little early last week, and the next has been delayed — so I’ve had a whole entire week to just . . . putter. It feels weird. I spent the whole week not really having a grip on what day it was, not really consulting my to-do list, not dealing in absolutely-must-get-dones. When I went to bed last night, I could have sworn it was Tuesday night. Really.

I started Monday with a bit of a brainstorming session, knowing that I had at least a couple of free days ahead of me. I took my tea out to the front porch first thing in the morning and made a new list of all the outdoor projects I wanted to tackle in the next two years or so, just to get them out of my head. (I’m easily distractable when I’m working in the yard; I always see a dozen other things that need to get done that I don’t want to forget to do, and before I know it, I’m working on a bunch of things all at once. I needed some focus here.)

I’ve been working on the rock wall out front all summer, digging out this horrible invasive ornamental vine that is near impossible to get rid of (chameleon plant, or Houttuynia cordata — never, ever, ever plant this horrible thing in your yard). Earlier this summer, I pulled all the rocks down from one end of the wall and dug up the dirt behind it. This was actually a good thing, because that part of the wall was way too steep and the rocks were always tumbling down off it anyway, so I was able to take advantage of the opportunity to lessen the slope a bit. Then it got ridiculous hot and I got crazy busy, and it sat for a while. This past weekend I had time again and the weather cooperated, so I was able to get more of it dug out and partially reassembled.

Monday, as I sat with my list staring at the rock wall mess, I decided that today would be the day it would get done. The Lowe’s car-loader-upper guy was skeptical, but I assured him we could get those three bags of rocks, four bags of dirt, and eight bags of mulch in the Saturn. With room to spare. And we did. (I kind of wish they’d send the car-loader-upper guys home to help unload, though.) I got the rest of the rocks put back in place over top of some landscape fabric, and dumped the broken bricks, cinderblocks, and drainpipes that had been hidden under the rocks in my scrap pile back in the woods. I filled in around the rocks with the dirt, dug a trench next to the driveway and filled in with some rocks to help with the drainage, and put a nice layer of mulch over all of it.

Then I mulched this section in the backyard that I’ve been meaning to do for a few months now. (See “easily distractable” above.)

And then back to the front to dig some more of that stupid vine out of areas that don’t have rocks. All in all, a very good, productive day. There’s still about thirty square feet that needs to be dug out, but it got hot again, and I moved my attention indoors. Those of you who follow me on Twitter or are friends on Facebook saw what I bought, but it’s going to have to wait for another post for all the gory details.

This Song Has No Title

There is a song titled such on Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I love that song, as I do most little ditties that clock in just over 2:00 on my favorite artists’ albums (hello, “Nightingale Song”), songs that say something interesting but aren’t full-fledged anthems and yet were fun enough to include on the album.

Titles stump me, more so than writing itself. The big blank space before all that other blank space. The hardest thing in J-school for me was coming up with something to write about. If someone gave me an assignment, no problem, but sniffing out the story just wasn’t my thing. So I’ve been working on trying to ignore that space at the beginning, to leave it there to breathe a little and just start in on the guts, to let it flow and see what happens.

I haven’t been doing that here much — waah-waah, bad posting habits, self-flagellationcakes, zzzzzzz — it seems like everything has been flowing better on paper lately, in those few spare moments there have been to focus on mental output rather than input. And it’s been all about developing projects and classes and brainstorming for the next book, nothing yet share-worthy.

It’s been a busy summer. Despite my vow to schedule myself lightly this summer and not let another pass by without fully embracing it, I found myself in June with a mountain of projects on my desk and a major event to coordinate and a case full of nothing new for my summer shows. I haven’t really taken much of a break since spring, and even back then it wasn’t enough. So, hello, August, with your leisurely pace and minimal must-dos and very few standing obligations.

Last weekend was the Avon Lake Summer Market, always my best show of the year, but especially so this year. It was the first time they did a two-day show, Friday night and Saturday, and it was lovely. It seemed a little busier on Friday than on Saturday, but it was steady throughout, and I was able to move out much of the older stock I’ve been carrying around and am sick of looking at. The rest is getting disassembled and some of it reworked into new pieces.

And speaking of reworking, it’s time to get up to the studio, to clean up and put away the detritus from last weekend, to knock out a few special orders, and to start work on some new things that have been lolling about in the back of my head.

whither summer?

Target has shrunk their summer things down to one pathetic little aisle and have had the back-to-school stuff out for a couple of weeks now. The lady at Lowe’s told me the citronella oil lanterns just inside the entrance were all they had left and that they’d be going on clearance soon.

It’s July.

This constant pushing ahead, pretending it’s two months later than it really is, drives me up a wall. What do you do when a hose springs a leak and you need to replace it in August? When your bathing suit tears? When a tree branch levels your patio table? You’re SOL, because you’re not going to find replacements in the stores.

Why do we have this urge to live in the future instead of enjoying the present? To push and push and push, until Christmas ornaments are out before Halloween, swimsuits hit the stores in February, and annuals appear at the home stores weeks before they can survive in this climate.

Don’t get me wrong. Project management is one of my things, and I understand needing to plan ahead and all that, but it’s getting ridiculous.

I want to live in the here and now, to not mourn summer before its time, to enjoy every last sunshiny breeze and juicy downpour.

Tetris

I’m a puzzle girl. I like putting my brain through its paces, figuring out how something goes together, knowing that there is a solution and if I’m patient enough, it will eventually reveal itself.

Even though I have a Kindle subscription to the Plain Dealer, I still subscribe to the hardcopy Sunday paper so I can get at the two giant crosswords and the sudoku. (Yes, I know you can get those online, too, but it’s just not nearly as satisfying to me to work those online as it is to sit with pen in hand and cat in lap.)

The week past and the one coming, however, are ruled by real-life Tetris. Tetris of the calendar + to-do list kind. On my plate right now are:

I know I can make this happen and still maintain my sanity. But well-wishes are still gratefully accepted.

the only constant is change

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about change lately, trying to make peace with the idea that it’s the state of change that is normal, that nothing stays the same, and that it’s good that it is so. See, I tend to travel within the ruts I wore into my path long ago. While I almost always have a lovely time and some fun surprises when I’m jolted out of those ruts, I (usually) feel comfortable there, and I don’t always take the time to reexamine them, to see if they are still working for me and if I still want to go where they are taking me. I think most people work that way.

So, I’m trying to pay more attention to my habits and to shift those that need shifting to reflect the way my life is now, not the way it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. And I’m working hard at acknowledging where I came from while letting those former mes have a nice little tea party in the past, where they belong.

storms!

Crazy, loud, crash-after-crash-of-lightning storms in the middle of the night last night. I woke up just long enough to notice and to remember that I had indeed unplugged my computer before I went to bed, then just rolled over and went back to mostly asleep with the occasional “oh yeah, there’s another lightning strike close by” tick in my brain. Yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep, and despite going back to bed in the middle of the morning and getting another couple of hours, I was soooooo tired last night. The acres of Mexican food on my plate at dinner with a friend probably didn’t help in that department. But I was able to get some fabulous, wonderful sleep last night with the windows cracked open, storms or no storms, and this morning feels like luxury for it.

The one good thing about being up so early yesterday morning is that I was able to finish up a project and get it ready to ship out even before my normal wake-up time, so I was able to spend the rest of the day cleaning up a few nagging loose ends and getting ahead on one of my other projects (the one that will continue to eat this afternoon, despite my being a little ahead of schedule on it now).

I’ve got two weeks of constant motion and progress and plans in front of me, but I don’t mind. I’ve been working a lot this past year on the concept of flow, and working with my projects and obligations and such to swim through them gracefully, rather than treating them as objects that have to be hurdled or bullied or broken down into submission, and it’s made a huge difference in my work and how I feel about it.

Ah, Friday!

Friday for me is usually a light day, a kind of limbo-y go-with-the-flow and deal-with-miscellaneous-stuff day. I work hard so that I don’t normally have a ton of editing work to do on Friday, and if there is any, I try to make it the kind that doesn’t require a lot of super concentration (formatting references, applying style codes, prepping manuscripts). Friday is my day for marathon errand running (Costco, Heinen’s, Trader Joes, libraries, Target, recycling, Lowe’s — whatever needs to be done). But I try to leave it a little loose, too, so that if the whim hits I can check out a new shop or walk on the beach or take myself out to lunch or whatever strikes my fancy as a special little treat. Especially when the weather is nice, as it is today, it’s good to be out and about in the big world where you run into other people instead of playing hermit in my office.