Chatterbox 4/08-6/08

6-30-08

This poor guy almost got killed by the lawn mower. Lucky for him he didn't have a scratch on him but he sure is mad! I actually caught his tongue on this picture as he's trying to feel us out.

6-29-08

I got a nice email from Sherrie, Queen of Olalla (hehehe). Hope you don't mind that I'm putting your email up along with your pictures Sherrie. It's just that we were having a discussion over at the lampwork forum about blogs just the other day. I said that my customers are more visual so I try to put mostly pictures up and Sherrie's email came the very same day....proof that I know my peeps pretty well!

Amy, I have to tell you how much I love your blog because of all your great pictures. My kind of blog -- mostly pictures, and a little text! I've really enjoyed watching the studio's progress, and I adore your nature pictures and especially the pictures of the 'dorables. I also reeeeeeally love the purplish/lavender background for your site. One of my favorite colors. If you don't believe me, I've attached a picture of my front door. <g> And if you still don't believe me, I've also attached a picture of my mailbox stand.

And here's Sherrie's photos:

6-28-08

It's frog season here as well as snake season. Not a lot of them this year. When the creek behind us is full, unlike now, we have tons of them and you can hear them croaking all night.

6-22-08

Wally is back to working on my studio. He's started in on the old windows we have and he's been stripping the paint off of them and then staining the wood. These are just being inserted inside regulation windows.

6-20-08

I just finished putting the new images up! It's supposed to be 100 degrees here tomorrow and we are going to stop by a little bead bizarre (Freudian slip! LOL!) at the local glass store. Local being an hour away. I'm very glad I don't have a booth there so I can just stop by and then get back in my air conditioned car...quickly!

6-16-08

Death of a Vulcanizer

It was not a good weekend here. I'm still trying to play catch up with wholesale orders and one of our vulcanizers up and dies. There is no way we could wait to order a part to get it fixed. We have two old vulcanizers that we purchased from Mostly Animals (remember them?) but they had done their own vacuum pump modification on them which we were not thrilled about. So Wally tore them apart, switched out parts form the dead vulcanizer, combined parts from the two others and came up with a "new" machine. Took him all freaking day.

6-14-08

It's officially snake season again. This is the biggest garter snake I have ever seen. We had to rescue it from Sissy and Charlie. I think it was too big for them to "play" with.

I'm still waiting to get the new images back from the engraver but I'm hoping that we'll have them for the end of the week.

6-4-08

New images are coming! I've gotten the artwork off to the engraver today. There are 24 new images and some of them are from my new artist Monica. She did the one here for me....is it not just the coolest?!!! I'm off tomorrow to the MA show and when I get back I'll need a bit of catch up time but I should have the new images released late next week or early the following week. Whooohooo!

5-17-08

We had a male Turkey hanging out with his harem of three girlfriends. He was really strutting around for them. shortly after taking these pictures I saw a coyote in our yard stalking them and I had to send Wally out to chase it away. Broad daylight and in our yard...not a good thing when you have cats.

5-13-08

I was taking bead pictures and thought I try and get some pics of my helper. Of course he moved but I thought it was still a cool picture.

5-9-08 The latest jewelry trend is the Pandora or Troll bracelets. They are 4mm chains that you can put different beads on. For a lampwork artist to make these it requires a bead hole of 5mm so I had to order some special supplies. Now I'm addicted to making these beads and I can't seem to keep them in my Etsy store.

4-17-08

A picture that Wally took while on his boat. This is one scary big rattlesnake.

4-8-08

Just been doing a lot of bead making lately and keeping on top of mail orders for stamps. The Sacramento show is this weekend and both Wally and I will be there for it. Other than that I finished the taxes which is always a huge deal. I've worked on a few more new images but I'm not really sure when I'll get them released. I really wanted to have a nice amount this time before doing a release but I'll probably do with whatever I have ready by the end of this month. The RSC one year anniversary is this month also so we'll be having a big virtual convention at the end of the month.

This is a picture of Charlie hunting!