Last week when I stopped to get my mail at the box downtown, I noticed some lovely red leaves had fallen in the walkway.
My first reaction was....."So soon?" But I realized, as has happened far too many summers, that summer is so filled with work and things to do to reorganize our business, or in the past, traveling, doing shows.....that it pretty much came and went without notice.
I must say, it's important to me to take time for Autumn. To me it is one of the most glorious things God has made, part of the cycle of natural life. Just like everything He has done, he does Autumn up to a turn, even its little imperfections are perfect. I make myself stop and ruminate.
I brought the leaf home and pinned it to a cork board, where as you can see, the colors migrated a bit, it curled, dried, some of the colors more intense than others and in some ways, less so.
At the Bohemian Vibe Facebook group, where we mix media, brass stampings et al with polymer clay, the challenge for September was to make a parure.
A parure is a set of jewelry with three pieces or more, that go together.
The last two months have been my own personal business challenge as we opened the NEW B'sue Boutiques at Volusion. I've told quite a few people that moving our large unwieldy supplies website was a lot like childbirth....and it was. We have been refinining and moving things around on it ever since we redirected the domain. The process has been daunting, but we're getting it right this time.
Evidently those who follow us and shop with us think so too, as we passed the 500 orders mark---a first milestone---a day ago.
THEN: We discovered we needed to re-network and move all the business computers. We found a woman-run company to work with us, and I feel quite content that FINALLY all the tech stuff in this place will at long last, be as it should be.
GIFTS: I just can't seem to get to that parure for Bohemian Vibe. I LOVE POLYMER CLAY, and was so thrilled when Christi Friesen suggested we start this group together and see what would happen combining her techniques and approaches to clay work with things we sell at B'sue Boutiques and she sells at christifriesen.com
The more I learn about clay the more I love it, but the more I doubt I 'quite' have the gift. Or at least......if I do, the gift is quite far away just yet.
Katie Oskin of Kater's Acres and I have become good friends. She lifts me up and I have enjoyed having her here to shoot video for her to show on my YouTube channel three times since I met her in May.
Here is the video we did yesterday:
And she brought me some gifts:
Beautiful Skinner-blend leaves she had made with Lisa Pavelka cutters. Even a little acorn she'd made with one of our caps!
THEN she MADE me some gifts:
All from the video, and now mine.....Katie is so generous.
So, methinks....PERHAPS I can whip out some sort of a LEAF parure for the Bohemian vibe challenge. Maybe. I'm inspired, anyway. Leaves? Yeah, I think I can do this.
Some blended clay....might not be the way someone really deep into the art of working with clay would do it, but I will tell you something I do know about myself.
I really don't care about that.
It's about what *I* will discover. Not about what they think. ;-)
I particularly like this cutter, it comes from a large set of flower and leaf cutters by Makins Clay. We will have them at B'sue Boutiques soon.
I have another cutter from another set that I often use, I am not sure who makes it, but if you play with clay, you probably have it, I see it used alot.
So I made a bunch of clay headpins....leaves:
I am making some smaller leaves as well.....and I'll also need to figure out what sort of beads I want to make:
Katie demonstrates in the video how to make that spiral bead a bit differently than I do, she winds it around her finger. My way was always to form around a wooden skewer, I got very nice uniform ones that way....but they had a tendency to stick and sometimes you would impale your fingers trying to get them off the skewers.
OUCH!
ANYWAY, though my parure is far from finished I am starting to believe again that the gift for clay IS there, that meeting this challenge was a good idea even though pressed for time....
And that somehow I'll get this down. I sort of have a vision about it, now.
Autumn will not be missed after all.
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