Jigs and trains

This is the jig Nick made for me to make the sterling silver earwires I use on the big aluminum earrings. I needed to make earwires that are larger than the ones we use for all our other earrings because of the large diameter of the aluminum. I was making them by just bending the 20 gauge half hard wire around my fingers. This jig is somewhat quicker but more importantly allows me to make a consistent size earwire.

This is my stubby finger holding down the end of the wire that is still attached to the big coil of silver wire. This way we have no waste.

Snip...


Here they are on a finished product. These Big Chunky Chain Aluminum Earrings look really heavy but are amazingly light. I sold a couple of pair this week for the first time.Yippee

This is our Big Aluminum Treble Clef Pendant.

Brothers...

Henry wears this shirt almost everyday. He loves Thomas the Tank Engine and all things Thomas. It was traumatic week last week when they announced the recall of certain Thomas wooden trains and accessories that were painted in lead tainted red paint in China. We studied the pictures on the website and gathered up our two trains, a box car ,railroad crossing sign and stop sign and put it in the big bubble mailer (which luckily we have a lot of) and sent them back to the factory. It will take 6 to 8 weeks before they will send back replacements and a "free gift". Henry has all sorts of wonderful fantasies about what the free gift or "prize" as he calls it will be. I keep trying to remind him that it will probably be something he doesn't like or want so that he isn't disappointed. Every once in a while he still falls into despair when he realizes that another day has gone by and he still doesn't have his trains (as if he doesn't have 30 other ones to play with right here in his happy home.) I think the Thomas company needs to compensate parents across the world who have had to deal with this psychological trauma with more than a free gift.

I'm thinking an all expenses paid vacation in Hawaii would be fair compensation.

Fame,legos and wirework

Life has finally gotten back to normal busy instead of crazy busy. You can read all about our 15 minutes of internet fame on Nick's blog. Briefly, Nick's silly yet clever HTML Head earrings got picked up in a bunch of blogs and websites and were on the front page of Digg.com for about 24 hours. This resulted in a tremendous amount of sales in a very short amount of time. It has been very exciting and overwhelming but the fad has died down and we are now only selling a few a day. Which is great too.

Henry on his own designed these Lego earrings. He picked them out and told Nick precisely where he wanted them to be drilled so that they could be lego beads. He then took them to me and told me how he wanted them to be made into earrings. Then he told me to take pictures of them to sell on Etsy and to sell for $5 at Saturday Market.


He also designed this earring card for them to be displayed on.

Here is the desperate craftsman pleading for a sale. I did take them to the market and put them on our $6 earring board. They got lots of looks and laughs and comments. They didn't sell this week but I'm sure they will eventually. But then I realized that they would sell best as a pendant on our $5 pendant rack.So next week we'll make a bunch of lego pendants.

Another occupation of Henry's is farmer. He decided he wants this to be his Halloween costume and is practicing wearing it.

Max!

I got two recent requests for my Dragonfly wirework earrings to be made with blue beads. So these are them. I now sell them on Etsy and at the market.

This is another new design. Sterling Silver Spirals in a Circle earrings.

I also make these big in aluminum. They seem to do well in both sizes.
Sometimes.

to market, to market...

Well it's time to squeeze in some blogging into the already overfilled seconds of my life. Henyr is eating mac -n- cheese (the "white" kind ie. safeway organic brand) for breakfast and Max is having his billionth sippy cup of watered down juice. Bob the builder is temporarily keeping their attention. So that's how I do all this in case you were wondering- How does she do it all?This is what my booth looks like on the corner of 8th and Park on saturdays after I've gotten everything out of the car. It is usually about 9:20am at this point.

This is how it looks when everything is finally set up a mere 40 to 50 minutes later.

This is the big breadwinner
board of aluminum earrings. Please note the signs to the left which say "Light Weight Aluminum Earrings-with Sterling Silver Earwires"

Apparently they are invisible to most humans.

All day long I hear the potential customer say, "Those look really heavy " with a disappointed and disapproving tone. I cheerfully say in my I -think- you -are -all -so- smart- and -clever-really tone

"But they're not! They're aluminum!" (What a miracle !)

And then the PC (potential customer) picks it up and says "oh you're right! It is so light! But I can't wear that in my ears. They are too sensitive.

And again I say cheerfully because I love everybody, especially when they give me their money in exchange for my goods)

" The earwires are sterling silver!"

The PC then says something like " Really? They are? ohhhh!"

And this conversation repeats itself all day long with the intermittent PC becoming an actual paying customer. Occasionally after this conversation they say

"oh look, it says it right here."

Yes indeed it does. But then I wouldn't have the pleasure of having this conversation with you.... and you and you and you.

This is Elizabeth ,my market comrad who has been selling at the market as long as we have and is set up across from us. I stare at her booth all day long. I am delighted that she has temporarily moved on from the incense business especially as the allergy season commences and her extra layer of incense filled air really exasperates the twitchy allergy nose. She is now making faux dessert candles.

And now for the mandatory cute pictures of the boys:

How did my big brother get up there?

I did it! He actually was saying that when I took this picture.

Well Bob the Builder has lost their attention and I can no longer ignore my children. Nick is at an auction today so I guess I better figure out what the heck Max is freaking out about. dodo's?

sprouting seeds and head wounds

The sunflower seeds have started to grow!



This is a new design Icall Sterling Silver Vining Spiral Oval or something like that. I decided to start taking the big chunky aluminum stuff down a notch and do some more delicate sterling silver wirework again. Didn't sell them yesterday but I did have a customer tell me they looked like a paper clip. Thanks. Of course Henry had said the same thing but coming from a 4 year old, it's cuter.




I just listed these too. Big Chunky Chain Light Weight Aluminum Earrings.

Well the weather men were off again but this time in my favor. No rain! hooray! It was 10 degrees warmer than last week which made a big difference in over all comfort level and sales.
The freakiest/saddest part of the day was when an old man in a wheelchair assumed (and rightly so) that there was wheelchair access on the end of the curb right in front of my booth. Sadly there was no dip and he went off the curb, causing him to fall over and smash his head on the ground. There was blood pouring out of a huge gash in his head which I did not see but heard detailed accounts of. Luckily the woman looking at my jewelry at that moment was a nurse. She was instantly on the scene applying pressure to the bloody giant head wound and more nurses spontaneously arrived and 911 was called by at least 2 people right away. This situation reaffirmed my belief that I am not meant to be a nurse. But I am grateful for all of you out there who have the calling and can handle the emergency bloody head wound situation with calm and dignity instead of wanting to puke and run away crying.
I thought it disturbing that it took about 10 minutes for the paramedics and fire department to get there when the fire station is 2 blocks away. It was also disturbing that they did not think it was part of their job or a good idea to wash down the giant pool of blood covering the street corner. Yuck.
I particularly enjoyed the idiot hippy dad who watched his son put his hand down in the blood and said- "look, it's the old man's blood."
Neat.

Well the event was not good for sales. But it was all over except for the bloody residue after about half an hour. The market personal did a minimal cleanup and life went on. Hopefully the man will be alright. I really hope so. He had no family or friends with him at the time and the nurse said he was a stroke victim who had no use of one side of his body.

But the seeds are sprouting...

Gardens, Goats and Hexes

Well apparently you can put a hex on yourself when you proclaim your success on your blog even though I thought I took all proper anti voodoo wood knocking precautions. As soon as I posted my last blog post all our Etsy sales dried up. We went 4 days without a sale. We broke the dry spell with the sale of one of my aluminum big wire earrings on friday night.
I went to the market yesterday. It was pretty darn cold and sales were barely adequate especially for the day before Mother's Day. I drank my whole thermos of coffee by 2 and ate every crumb of food I brought with me while trying to keep my toes from going numb.
Well the good thing about not having a lot of sales is that there isn't a lot of jewelry to be made and we can focus more on the other stuff in life that really is more fun and important anyway. Nick has been mowing like a madman. When you have 3.8 acres there is nothing sexier than your man mowing (except as Nome pointed out, your man on a tractor mowing.) But since we don't have a tractor our DR Mower will have to do. We now have our garden area under control so the boys and I took to weeding and adding some bags of real good soil to our hard clay and infertile dirt we call a garden. We planted the mandatory bed of pumpkins and then some peas and beans. Today we planted some basil seeds.



Henry , the forlorn gardener.

Max, the thoughtful gardener.

We now have new squaters on our land too! Our wonderful hardworking neighbors Chris and Shelley ran out of pasture land for their flock of 4 goats and Mama Lama the guardian lama .So on friday Chris took his tractor with the mower attachment to our place and carved out a huge area for them to fence. They fenced it all in one day and now these guys are here in our back 40 (or rather 4) eating up all the nastiness that we can't get under control.


Hey good lookin'.



Max enjoys his goat friend.



I call him sweet ears.

And of course I couldn't post without adding one new pair of earrings. These are my newest giant crazy big aluminum earrings. I sold a pair last week to a young funky hip girl who liked having something dangling inside the middle of a big hoop on her ears. Hopefully others will have the same desire.

They are called Swinging Interior Spiral Light Aluminum Earrings.

Etch A Puke

I haven't blogged much because nothing all that exciting or interesting has been happening. Life is good and going well and that's just too boring to share. The market has been overwhelmingly lucrative and I am pleased as punch. A sweet red juicy sugar laden punch.
The new earring design that I blogged about in my last post have been selling really
well on Etsy. I seem to have found an appreciative audience for my crazy aluminum scheme. The dragonfly wirework earrings are doing quite well too. Who knew people are crazy for dragonflies? I DID!
Well here's something exciting that just happened as I sat here blogging. My disgusting fat annoying cat is throwing up all over the Etch A Sketch on our couch. The Etch A Sketch caught practically all of it. Hooray! One extra layer of filthy nastiness that won't reach my already filthy nasty couch. I tell you, life is just too good these days. Which of course is a scary statement to make out loud because then you have to knock on wood or do some other sort of anti bad luck voodoo dance before the good luck disappears and something horrible happens.
I guess I better go clean up that mess. Or maybe I'll just leave it for Nick to discover when he thinks he can sit down and relax on the couch.
Oh, the picture above is of our Sterling Silver Stamped Lizard Earrings. I carved the die for that many years ago before we had kids and I had time for reverse carving in steel. We just listed it today for the first time on Etsy.
Uggg- I hear the sounds of cat puking going on in the other room. Somehow I don't think there are any other lucky toys to catch the puke on this time. I guess the good luck is over.

Aluminum Market Debut

Well I finally managed to get my butt and all my stuff to the market this past Saturday. Once again the weather forecasters were mistaken in their predictions but it was good enough. No, it was not warm and sunny for most of the day, but overcast and chilly. It took me forever to set up as I discovered all the little things that I could have done earlier to make things go more smoothly. Luckily I had little pieces of scrap aluminum wire to keep together some of the hanging displays that were missing crucial screws that got lost somewhere along the way.

And that's not all that aluminum is good for. My new line of big bold aluminum earrings were a hit! I sold about 8 pairs once I figured out that I needed to have a little sign next to them saying " Light Weight Aluminum Earrings". The light weight factor is the key since they kind of have a big heavy industrial look to them that could scare you away.

As I lay awake at 5:30 am this morning after the annoying cat woke me up for no good reason other than he couldn't get outside because the screen door was closed and covered up his cat door, I thought of some new earring ideas and came up with these:


I call them "Ebb and Flow Swinging Spiral Aluminum Earrings".

Today the allergies officially began for me. The itchy eyes, face,nose,sniffly snorty coughing scratchy annoying allergies that can make me irritable. I usually don't get this way until June but it has come early this year for many people and I knew my turn was coming. Oh well.
The other spring related news is that Nick finally got our trusty old DR Mower running. We knew we were getting behind in the mowing when we were losing the children in the grass in the front yard.
I'm off to snort and sniffle now and dream of aluminum spirals.

Wimped out

Well that's what I get for publicly stating that I am committed to something. Now that whole world or at least the 3 people that read my blog can know that when I say I am committed,it really does depend if it is actually raining and cold at the time.
It is 7:28 am and I am still at home. It is raining and 42degrees. My hardcore committed friend and fellow lifelong marketeer ,Nome, called at 7am to say she is bailing out. It shattereed my confidence. I called the market and the lovely friendly Beth the market manager said yes, it is indeed raining. I said Is it cold? and she said "I have a chill in me like I did not have last weekened." I told her I wasn't coming and she said I was the 3rd vendor to call her to cancel out.
Well it's a good thing I don't have to live on the streets (yet). A few more crazy weekends of indecisive weather related rapid decision fluctuations and who knows where I will be blogging from. The mental hospital?
We used to do the market every single saturday no matter what for over 10 years. Then we had kids and Nick developed his Taig business. It's still a big part of our income but we don't need to depend on it solely. And that's my story for today...

UPDATE:
Wow, I'm so glad I did not go today. It rained all day long and was cold and miserable. Here is a big thanks to Nome who figured out not to go and gave me the early morning call. This is her website-Blessedbeads.
She does amazing work!

Food Fun, Dragonflies and Inspiration

So what is this happy boy eating?


Pizza with Mac n' Cheese embedded on top of it! Another testament to my fine parenting skills. It was Henry's idea. It isn't his usual favorite Spongebob Mac n' Cheese but the Safeway brand well designed Organic Mac n' Cheese with White Chedder instead of the usual neon orange we're used to. The Safeway Organic was actually cheaper than the Spongebob by Kraft so what the heck. My kids deserve the best in crappy food.



These are my newly revamped dragonfly wirework earrings. The older version had only one set of wings. It was a little too minimal . Also I admit that I never really realized that they generally have two sets of wings. I haven't researched it to see if there are dragonfly species with only one set of wings. But once I started looking at dragonfly stuff it became apparent that they usually are shown with 2 sets of wings. So two it is.
The weather forecast calls for light showers in the afternoon or rain for tomorrow (Saturday). This is the same sort of forecast I heard the last two Saturdays that convinced me to stay home and not go sell at the Saturday Market. But they were completely wrong. So I figure if I go it will rain and if I stay home it won't. So I'm going, even if it's hailing when I wake up. I'm committed!
Last satuday we watched "The Pursuit of Happyness" with Will Smith. It was a moving and inspiring story of a single Dad in San Fransisco in 1981 who struggles to make it, spends some rough times homeless but perseveres and eventually becomes a very successful stockbroker. The guy would study at night while riding public transportation because he had no place to stay and worked his ass off all day in a non paying internship. It's a true story.I felt like such a weak little boob not going to the market because it might rain and be a little cold. So I'm motivated for now. We'll see how it goes.

Smashing

This is the hammer and anvil that I use to smash ,I mean delicately forge,my wire with.

This is the part of my thumb that I also recurrently smash. It's always the same spot. It gets better and then a month or two later ,perhaps when a child is screaming for my attention and I am trying to get something done quickly, or just when my mind is wandering off in one of it's millions of directions thinking about all the things that need to get done , I inadvertantly smash the side of my thumb again. There's some sort of lesson here that apparently I am not learning.
It is also what I would like to do to the weather forecasters who told me that today would be cold and rainy. After bailing out on last weeks Saturday Market I was once again freaking out trying to decide whether or not to go again today. All the forecasts called for cooler,colder,rainy showers. I made Nick do the data research and decide for me. He is the most logical person I know who operates generally without emotions getting in the way. His analysis after studying the various weather sites and our financial situation was that it did not make sense to go today. It rained all night and then when I woke up at 8:15am (or rather when Henry woke me up) it was not raining. It hasn't rained a drop all day. It has been partly cloudy which means the other part has been SUNNY. It has been warmish and a little breezy. I curse those weather bastards and if I had a hammer and anvil near their thumbs or other appendages , well,... I think you know where I'm going with this.
Well I have been trying to put up a picture of a new pair of earrings but Blogger is having some sort of technical difficulties and won't let me so you'll just have to be left with that blood clotted image on your mind instead of a lovely pair of earrings.

More rituals

The hunt....

It was perfect egg hunting weather. The grass was appropriately overgrown (unintentionally).The boys were equipped with the Luftschein/Carter official all purpose candy gathering equipment.We even had our friend Ethan join us .

The boys had built a little nest for themselves out in our field and were gorging themselves on their well filled eggs.

Ethen looks a little quesy .... Henry looks a little giddy from his sugar rush...

It was a fun holiday which was made even more pleasant by a surge in sales. This aluminum swirls and spirals medium barrette has been a big hit this week. It looks heavier than it is but due to the miracle of aluminum it is actually quite light.

I intended to go to the Saturday Market this past Saturday for the opening day. I actually got up at 6:30am, drank my coffee and drove down almost all the way but the rain kept pounding harder and harder. The sky got darker the closer I got to Eugene and panic started to set in. I couldn't face setting up in the pouring rain and spending 12 hours down there being miserable. So I turned around, called Nick at the first turn I take towards Cheshire and acted like a crazy woman. I really hate making decisions. Especially about the weather and what my potential profit would be for the day. I drove a little further towards home and then the market gods mocked me by making the rain stop. But by then it was too late to turn around again . But I still called Nick just to try and force him to make the decision for me. He told me that the online weather site said there was a 100% chance of rain. I came home and went to our little 4 year old friend's Princess themed birthday party and had a lovely time but of course the sun came out and it was a glorious warm,yet windy day. So annoying...

I later spoke to a friend who told me she saw other marketeers turn around on the way down to market and that it did rain again in the afternoon. It was a tough call. But Etsy has been awesome this week.So I guess it all evens out. Or something...

No more chocolate for a few days, maybe...

Festivities

Happy Birthday Max!. He turned 2 on Tuesday April 3rd. His big brother has been saving the "4" candle from his birthday cake in November and insisted we use it on Max's. He intends to use it on every birthday for the rest of his life until he is a "man".


The official mauling of the cake using the candles as implements of destruction and occasionally as a fork.


In order to meet the requirements as a good mother I purchased once again the official Paas egg dying kit. I stuck to the basic simple kit instead of all the fancy new ones they've come up with with different themes like motor vehicles. Call me a traditionalist.

Here's the set up with the over excited boy who was whining for days to do this project.

I curse you lame egg holder that either squeezes the egg too tight that it cracks or else the sucker flies out of it. Of course as a wire worker I could have come up with some sort of ingenuous device to hold the egg properly while dipping. But I was too lazy to take this any further. I'll curse instead.

Now that's a good egg.

Henry thought all the cracked ones were perfect for eatting right away. Of course my picky eater removed the yellow yummy yolk of each one and ate only the whites. Note to self: that's how you stay so thin.

Here is the festive final product.

There may be a special place in hell for me for this all inclusive misappropriation of ritual or else I have all my bases covered. But it looks so pretty.

Twenty years ago today...

Today, April Fool's Day, is our 20th Anniversary. We dug through our photo albums and Nick scanned a couple of pictures of us from that first year together. He has a more flattering one of me in his blog. I look like I have some sort of weird blotchy tumour growing on my nose which I think I would remember if I really did have a weird blotchy tumour on my nose at some point in my life.
Ahhh so young a fresh (and blotchy) we were back then. We seem to have matching khaki's and I believe that is a tie dye headband in my hair that inadvertantly matches Nick's groovy tie dye. All I can say is thank god for the advances in the past 20 years in hair products for girls with Jewish frizzy hair. And thank you Clairol for helping me to maintain the illusion that 40 is the new 30.

In honour of this special day we went to the coast and went to the Oregon Coast Aquarium.The kids were well behaved and Max didn't have a single tantrum or meltdown. Maneuvering the cheapo Kolcraft double stroller was a challenge. The wheels seem to prefer to run perpendicular to the direction one is intending to go.

This picture was taken after Max peed on me while I was trying to do a stealth stand up diaper change.

Max was entranced by the fish in the very cool walk through giant tunnel aquarium.

There was a girl on her cell phone in the middle of it saying, "Can you hear me now?"

They had a little kids play area with stuff like this to play on.

We were done in only 2 hours and the day was sunny and lovely so we headed off to the beach. As we descended down the cliff walkway to the beach , the icey wind ripped into my ears and reminded me of why I'm really not a fan of the Oregon Beach outside the comfort of my car. The views are lovely, the wind is brutal. But of course the kids had fun and we'll have to return for a better prepared extended visit with lots of pails and shovels for proper sand castle building. And a big warm hat and parka for me.

I couldn't do a blog post without hawking at least one item. I randomly relisted a hanging vase yesterday and within an hour we got two large orders for assorted hanging vases. One was from Kansas and the other was from Oklahoma. Some sort of weird Middle America vortex found my vases and felt compelled to purchase simultaneously making a happy afternoon for me.

This Wide Flat With Purple Accents Hanging Vase was one of the ones purchased and now relisted.

They make unusual Mother's Day gifts for the right Mom.

Happy Anniversary Nick! I love you more than ever!