Sandra Graves / Isis Rising

On Sunday, Dawn and I were up early bringing our items to our respective cars and packing so that we were ready to leave.  Dawn was planning to hit the sales floor one more time, I had a class starting at 9am.  We managed to get accurate bills from the hotel (the usual snafu existed again, but it was solveable), paid with our cards and grabbed a quick breakfast.  Then we were off to the convention center.  My class was quite fun - drilling stone with a diamond core-drill, inserting sterling silver tubing to make a tube rivet, and flaring the tubing to fit the stone.  She had some very soft stones and some harder stones.  Whatever the black stones were made from, they permanently marked my fingernails, so I will be wearing the class for a week or so :-)  I didn't do a great job on the rivets, but I'll do better when/if I play with the technique on my normal work bench.  It's not a high priority project, but it was fun and it will come in handy at some point in my artistic carreer. 

After class and one more quick drop by the sales floor to hug my friend Beki and her hubby Shawn, I returned to my car, put the last item into the trunk, and headed out of the door towards home.  I was exhausted, but happy, and I did indulge myself by allowing myself a short nap in a rest stop on the way home.  I arrived home around 7pm, dragged my suitcases in and started work on my Emails.  I only had 1000 messages waiting for me on my main Email addy!  I'll be working my way through these for a while. 

And now I'm working towards my next workshop date.  I'll be heading to Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana at the end of July, and continuing with a trip to Thompson Enamel for a two-day workshop on torch-fired enamels before returning home.  That's an expense that the shop won't pay, so I need to scrape the dollars up for this from my investments or the interest on my CD's.  It'll be tight, but I'll make it happen.  I love learning new techniques - and so many of them eventually find a place in my finished work :-)