still making lots of soup and delicious jewelry

Soon it will be too hot for soup-making, but never too hot for playing with beads and charms and stuff.

in my mind I'm goin' to Carolina ...

It's almost time to pack up the old Volvo wagon and head South for a bit.  The baby is talking, the bigger kids growing ... well, bigger.  FaceTime is wonderful, but little Izzy thinks that Grandma Maggie lives in Mama's phone.  There's no place to set up all my wire and beads, so I'm trying to get everything finished, photographed and listed on Etsy before I go.

Can't wait for the AppleFest and the Dixie Classic Fair.  Apple dumplings!  Pig races!  Autumn in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Maybe we can get in a visit to the alpaca farm.  Maybe I can start to look for my dream house ...

green green ...

In the Town of Islip, where Bay Shore is, we had an incredible amount of rain one day last week.  13 + inches in less than 6 hours.  I've never seen it rain so hard.  The streets became rivers and little gurgling brooks turned into raging torrents.  Starting a block away, our neighborhood was evacuated, but miraculously, our basement didn't even flood.  It was almost nice not being able to go anywhere, just sit around and play with my beads and wire, totally free of guilt.  Why do I still feel guilty that I no longer have a nine-to-five job?

Anyway, I used my guilt-free time wisely and made a couple of new necklaces:

I thought I had used up all my lovely big faceted Prehnite beads, but I found a few more.  Sometimes being disorganized is a good and useful thing.  The little iridescent gray/green Czech beads are called "ghost beads" and are quite special.  I should have bought more because they don't seem to be available any more.

grey skies

Grey skies - too cold to get the peas planted but perfect for photographing my latest pieces outdoors.

I've been home from the Land of Barbeque and Hush Puppies for a week now, missing my grandchildren terribly.  I found out that airport security doesn't seem to care how much wire and beads of all persuasions you've managed to pack into your carryon, as long as you have nothing in a liquid state, they are not interested.  And also - even though you've brought everything you thought you could possibly need, there will be some essential thing that's sitting on your worktable at home.

And then of course, there was this slight distraction:

Here are my latest offerings:

green man amulet necklace

close-up of green man

earth & bone charm bracelet

amethyst peace charm bracelet

the deer shaman's necklace

close-up of deer shaman's necklace

red jasper warrior's amulet necklace

close-up

"At Spring Again"

My brother-in-law is what my daughter calls a "freegan".  He scours the neighborhood at all hours of the night looking for usable stuff that unenlightened businesspeople are throwing away.  Generally, he looks for scrap metal that he can cash in, but sometimes he finds some pretty cool stuff.  A couple of years ago, he came across a box of plastic hands behind a rheumatologist's office.  They apparently had been used to illustrate the difference between normal and severely arthritic hands and my husband has used the most grotesque of them to decorate on Hallowe'en.  I needed a way to display bracelets at a book signing where I was offered a table, so my brilliant and beautiful friend Janet suggested I use some of the hands.  I took all of the normal hands and painted them with acrylics to hide the worst of the scratches and wear.  I think they turned out pretty cool.  (And Dave still gets to use the distorted ones for his creepy Hallowe'en display.)

The book to be signed, by the way, is called "At Spring Again" and is a collaboration between Liz Casey (poetry) and Doris Diamond (photos).  https://www.facebook.com/AtSpringAgain.  Profits from the book will be donated to "Food Not Bombs".

Thank you Thing.