Long Overdue

It's been a very long time, but I have a pretty good pile of excuses. At the end of February, my sweet little dog, Crazers, who's been featured on this blog many times, got very sick. I spent a few weeks trying to get her better. Many trips to the vet, working half-days from home, cooking her meals, numerous meds several times a day, but alas, there wasn't really anything that could help. She was just old and had too many health problems. So I had to say goodbye to her on March 9.

In a crazy desperate attempt to mitigate my sadness, I adopted another dog right away. But after a few days, it was clear that she was way too aggressive toward our cat. Perhaps with time and patience and a month off work, I might have been able to teach them to get along, but I was in no state to do that. Not to mention, the shelter neglected to test her for heartworms until AFTER I'd filled out the paperwork and went back to pick her up after being spayed, and it turns out she had them. They said they'd pay for the treatment, but she'd be on a waiting list for a couple of weeks. It really was more than I could handle, so I decided to return her. At least it didn't take long for someone to foster her, because she really was super cute and sweet to people. Anyway, after that, I was very depressed and totally unmotivated to do anything at all. So I took some time off from jewelry for awhile. We've since decided to get another kitten instead, and worry about another dog (in trainable puppy form) once we don't live on the 3rd floor of a condo. Kitten searching commences next weekend. I can't wait!

So in the last couple of weeks, I've managed to make a few things that I like pretty well. I've become a little obsessed with making this particular style of earrings:

A few days ago, I ordered some more lampwork pairs, and plan to make plenty more in this style. 

Next month, I'm going to be a vendor at the New Orleans stop of the national touring Sugar Art Fashion Show, which I'm excited to do! There's only going to be a handful of vendors, so hopefully I'll do pretty well and maybe make some good contacts with buyers, shop owners, etc.

Here are a couple of bracelets I've done this week:

I will do my best to update my blog more regularly at this point!

(Sorry about the Captcha for comments, but I was seriously getting 5-10 spam comments a day for awhile, so I had to.)