You Had Me at Copper

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This mandala is full of hand stitched metallic copper thread detail on moss green cardstock. I embellished it with paper shapes, raku style beads and amber Swarovski crystals. The center is topped off with a copper sun button.

It's framed in a 8" x 8" wood frame with glass, ready to hang on your wall. $38.00

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One would think I just discovered the macro setting on my camera. Truthfully, I recently learned to use it consistently successfully!

I love how this piece turned out. I'm going to have to make one for myself, copper freak that I am. I was extra pleased at how nicely that frame goes with the copper stitching. I buy my frames online and it's sometimes hard to trust if what I'm seeing on my screen is the true color. I will be ordering more of these frames shortly for some custom pieces I'm working on. I met with the customer after work yesterday to give her some options in framing.

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Yesterday was to have been a busy day at the house. A guy was here to clean the gutters. Steve hasn't had time and cash poor Simon hasn't been motivated enough to do it. So I found someone through a local ad who came the next day. He'll come back today to fix a couple of downspouts for us. Money well spent.

I arranged for two Rochester ReUseIt (formerly Freecycle) people to come take away about a dozen landscape timbers and the bricks that make up our sidewalk. I told you we're downsizing our garden/landscape. We've battled with those bricks for 8 years. We've had the sidewalk rebuilt once and they laid down weed barrier first. All to no avail - the weeds keep popping through. The red brick sidewalk has looked nice. For about 5 minutes.

The woman that came for the bricks was unable to remove them, broke her "little shovel" in the process and gave up. I went out last night and was able to remove a couple, using a regular sized shovel. I liken it to getting that first brownie out of the pan. That first one is a challenge but the rest come out easily. (These bricks are not mortared in, but they are packed down and together very tightly.)

The woman who was to take the landscape timbers had a family emergency with her elderly father. So I drew new names for both projects and those people will come sometime this week or weekend.

Steve had already volunteered to find someone to pour us a cement sidewalk. We almost never use that door anyway, so I don't care when he gets to it.

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Steve worked late last night so I spent some quality studio time putting my framed art back together. I had removed the glass from each piece so I could photograph it for my shop. That's been on my to-do list for a long time so I'm very happy to have completed that task. I think the art looks much better than the scanned images I had been using.

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I received an application yesterday from a friend who is organizing a Holiday Craft Show at St. Jude's Church on Lyell Avenue on November 29. I do a lot of shows with her so I know this will be a quality show. It's juried and all hand-made. She's also on the board of the Rochester Museum & Science Center's Holiday Bazaar so she told me I was all set for this year's show too. Yay! That was my best show to date and I was really counting on getting into that one again.

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