Patera pictures to come - and supply-collecting

It may be foolish of me to try to write an entry right now, when I'm operating on very, very little sleep, but I'm in the mood and I'm not always in the mood lately, so it seems best to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak. (In fact I'm not sure I've touched an iron since we moved a year and a half ago, but there is one around here somewhere, I do know that!)

I've made several pieces of jewelry lately - mostly with Patera findings, because I'm having fun experimenting with them. Most of them have come out quite decently, although just about every one has some flaw that makes it unsellable, at least to my mind. But not unwearable - so these are probably destined to become pieces I wear myself, or else gifts. What I haven't been doing lately is photographing anything, but I'm sure I'll get back to it eventually. I do want y'all to be able to see my little imperfect experiments with Diamond Glaze.

I've been gathering the supplies for the Claudine Hellmuth class (see sidebar for link), which starts next week. I ended up spending quite a lot of money on the search - although to be fair, not all of it is Claudine's fault. I am not good about sticking to a shopping list, and given an excuse to go in lots of craft stores, I am inevitably going to come out with things that have nothing whatsoever to do with Claudine's class. Like, for example, the new Industrial Chic line of jewelry findings that Michael's is selling. I haven't found a Michael's yet that has Claudine's line, although some of them are supposed to. But they all have Industrial Chic! I went to a couple of very large stores - the one on Bee Caves in Austin, and the one on Weslayan & Bissonet in Houston, as well as the also fairly large one in Pearland and the smallish one at Baybrook, and none of them had so much as a hint of Claudine's paints. So I don't know what "selected stores" means - they must be selecting ones in New York or California or someplace.

Part of the problem is that I am not an actual scrapbooker - I own some scrapbooking materials, mostly bought for other purposes. I do play around with card making and I seem to have acquired quite a little collection of rubber stamps lately, and of course I'm prone to buying anything at all that might be made to intersect with jewelry-making. Claudine's class is forcing me to buy things I hadn't gotten around to, like gesso and better-quality paint, and a brayer and other goodies which I really should have had already anyway.