Reality Intrudes Again - I'm Home

Well, I'm home again after a week of creativity, hugs, color, shine and the sound of hammers and torches. I had a blast. I was more than ready to return home - I actually missed my Hubby and my routine, but it will take me the better part of a week to catch up with my emails and LJ and I want to play with some of the new techniques and tools I learned/bought and I can't do anything until I get caught up with work stuff. BUT, I'm going to make this happen.

Richard Salley is a jeweler from Santa Fe, NM. I took a
"Double-Hinged Bracelet" project from him and loved it.
I set a LOT of rivets in the project. I think I'm finally
comfortable with rivets. Yeah!

I'm determined that this next year be a creative one. I purchased some of the missing components for a project I've wanted to get started on for more than a year, and I also accepted a challenge project from one of the bead manufacturing companies to bead a project for them using the supplies they provided. I enjoy challenges of this nature, so I'm in the planning stages on this. I also have two repairs on my desk waiting for me to get going, a mail order to fill, and ... well, it seems like life just went on while I was on vacation.

Steven James taught a class in plique de jour enameling using the torch. The
actual items we worked on were quite small, but I can see how this will work
in my own, larger pieces, and the class was great fun. My table-mate was
Ruby, an 84-year-old who was dynamite. Rock on, Ruby!

While I was gone, the store computer crashed at least twice and our burglar alarm was tripped once. As I told my roommate, "This is why I don't get allowed out very often." But I'm already planning for next year. I'll be paying this year off for a couple of months but it was absolutely worth it and Shruti said that she wants to come over once more for the B&B Show next year, hopefully taking one of the Master Classes again. I'm seriously thinking about one of the Master Classes myself, despite their high expense, just because Andy Cooperman will be one of the teachers and I think what he's teaching could be excellent for my own work.

Andy Cooperman specializes in the unusual and that's what I want to
learn from him. When I took my seven-days with Linda Darty at the
Revere Academy of Jewelry, he was teaching the class next door. I really
regretted that I couldn't take both teachers classes. But I don't regret the choice
I made - Linda Darty was phenomenal and helped my enameling skills so much!

I'll try and take some pictures of what I did over the past seven days so that I can share with all of you, but I'm really happy with what I did, the classes I took, and the people I met. Now if the hotel could just get the bill corrected and email a copy to me, I'll be happy. Are you listening, Hilton Milwaukee?