An early bloom...

So as of two nights ago, seven of my UFOs (UnFinished Objects, for those who haven't read the last entry) have now become FOs I guess you could say. They are finished and they are GORGEOUS! ...if I do say so myself. Here's a picture of the bunch of them:

 I was able to acquire some black felt that made a perfect backing for my flower broaches... well, for most of them. (Oops, I just realized I didn't take a picture of the backs of any of them.)I have 3 that just won't look right with a black backing and they're going to need white felt. This I should be able to get on Monday. So I decided to take a few pictures of them, but they won't be the pictures I use when I put them online for sale. I'm going to give eBay a try and maybe ArtFire, for these pretties. Here's a few close-ups of some:

This pic has a quarter in it for size reference. These flowers are pretty big.

The official pictures will actually be edited a bit more. Making sure the focus is on point and the lighting does them justice. There also needs a bit of color correction done. The green placemat underneath them should be a brighter green but I'm on my netbook right now and I don't have the tools to fix that and I don't feel like turning on the big laptop. I've been working on this blog entry all day actually. I've been having a lazy Sunday... well it's a bit more complicated than that, due to body aches and pains, etc...

So, as I mentioned in a past entry, I wasn't so sure about doing the backing in the first place but felt maybe they needed to be done. Well, they turned out so nice that it makes me want to make more of the flowers. Besides, I have a lot more different bead colors now than when I first made these flowers, and I feel like I could come up with some very interesting color combinations. On top of it all, I'm so happy that I've been able to make jewelry again after so much time of not really being able to make any. Hell, before the last blog entry I did about jewelry making, the last one was at the end of June of last year. That's far too long.

Late night rambling...

It's 1:05 am and Rob is in bed working on his computer, and since he's on my side, I am at my desk working on some designs that have popped into my head. I've started keeping drawings/sketches in this nice spiral-bound sketch book that I had originally gotten for some other purpose that it never got used for. Then one day I realized that it would be great for holding my jewelry design ideas.

What I really wanted to be doing is working on a few UFOs. For those of you who don't know, in the jewelry making/crafting world, UFO stands for UnFinished Object. The UFOs I wanted to work on are these really beautiful beaded flowers that I want to make into broaches. I have been debating on whether or not I wanted to put a backing on them or just affix the pin backing as is. After discussing it with Rob, I realized that I really do want to add a backing. When I figured out the backing I wanted. I realized that they were probably way in the back of our storage unit and probably won't be seen until we are moved into a new place. So now I have to wait and see if I can find something similar without breaking my ever-so-tiny bank. Hopefully, I'll find something tomorrow as I really want to finish them while I still have the steam in me to do so.

So to take up the time while I'm awake, I decided to go through a folder that had a bunch of tutorials and designs in them, and of course when I do that, I end up with all sorts of neat ideas that hardly have anything to do with what I just looked at. The funny thing is, I always say that I am very bad at visualization. Whenever I read the books on meditation, I would always groan and hate when it got to the part about visualizing the apple, etc. (btw, why do all meditation books have that part about the freaking apple? But I digress...) But when it comes to jewelry, I can always envision it in my mind and “see” it clearly. Maybe I should just meditate on jewelry...

“Close your eyes and visualize the bead... turn the bead around in your mind... with your mental hands, thread your mental needle... pass the needle through the bead...”

Yeah, right.