What Have I Been Working On Lately?

Not as much as I would like. We rearranged some parts of the house last month and its a good thing. I can now actually use my work table and I can actually find stuff for the most part now. But things still have a ways to go as far as organizing everything. I'll get to that in a bit. Needless to say, I haven't gotten a whole lot of bead work done lately. But I did get a new pair of earrings made and posted to my Etsy shop. I call them my "Orange you Glad to See Me" earrings.

They're very light and fairly small. You can see in the picture below just how small they are (pardon how blurry and overexposed it is, I stink at taking pictures):

They were very easy to make and took no time at all. In fact, in less than an hour I'd made three or four pairs (I sent some out for some earring swaps).

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Swap time!

I promised in a previous post that I'd post a link to my next earring swap so here it is: Autumn Earring Swap. The idea is to make earrings that reflect the Autumn season. They can be made of any media and its up to you to interpret the theme. I have 12 participants already, which is a nice number. But I certainly wouldn't mind if a few more folks signed up. You have until September 28th to sign up. After that date, sign up will close and partners will be assigned. Then you have until October 22nd to make and mail your earrings to your partners.

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Getting Organized! (Again...)

Now, I mentioned we're reorganizing and rearranging some areas of the house. Part of that involves my craft and beading supplies. Yikes. I have discovered that I need to respect the Stash and to make my peace with it. But that doesn't mean I shall let it take over my life (or my spare bedroom). So part of this overhaul, besides finding a home for everything, will be to go through all my stuff and reevaluate what I need and don't need.

Here's a before shot of my worktable (before we rearranged rooms):

The bookshelves that you can just see on the left, along with the ones you can't see to the right, were all moved out of the room. We organized and purged my giant book collection (man, do I have a lot of books), found new homes for some of our sports memorabilia and our knick-knacks, and decided that a few of our bookshelves had served their purpose and could now move on with their lives and bring joy and book holding to someone else (ie. we're taking them to Goodwill later this month).

The work table was moved over to the left and on the right is where we moved our beast of a desk. Here's a shot of the new work table area (pardon the mess, works-in-progress and things I'm still finding a home for):

To the right of the table is a tall book shelf that holds a stereo (so I can bead to groovin' tunes), some baseball memorabilia, my beading books and magazines, my ATC binder and some other goodies that still need to find a permanent home. To the left of the table, on the floor, are all my tackle boxes that serve as bead boxes. Then to the left of that is the closet. The floor of the closet holds my two plastic rolling drawer carts and a number of plastic bins (now labeled, yay me) for my knitting/crochet supplies, paper embellishments and ephemera, and my fabric stash and sewing stuff. Still needs work, but that will be another post.

Do you need a little help getting your stash (or stashes) organized? Do you need some ideas on just how to get started? Well, do I have the site for you!

I recently found the Organizing Junkie, via the Material Mama podcast. The Organizing Junkie has a wonderful blog chock full of great tips for organizing, containerizing, and keeping your sanity amongst the clutter while you learn to take control of it all. She has written up some great entries, gives you additional resources to check out and she's also organized her "30 Day Challenges". There are some people who participated in these that organized their craft areas. So if you're wondering what others have done, check out her blog.

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Bird-Brained?

Oh, and there is one more thing I have been working on all summer that I wanted to share. Its more a sewing project but I used beads to embellish it, so I'm going to share it on this blog. I did a one-on-one forum swap on Swap-Bot. My partner asked for a bird stuffie. Well, I had recently made this one for a normal stuffie swap:

It was a fun and easy pattern (from Crafts n Things magazine, you can find the pattern on their website, for free) that doesn't take long (provided you properly attach the beak to the body before you sew up the body seams.....I'm still learning, cut me some slack). So I thought I'd whip another one up in no time for her. The crafting gods were against me on this one. Maybe they didn't like my choice of fabric, who knows. But I messed up on the second bird a couple of times. Then I finally had the beak correctly attached to the body part (some day I WILL remember how to do that before I sew up the body, really, I will). I began to sew the body and my machine crapped out. I ended up hand stitching the rest of it, and that just took me forever. I finally completed her a couple weekends ago though. I decided she was a little bit plain though, so this time around, I embellished her with some beads. Here she is:

Full Body Shot

Close-up of the beading on the wing

Close-up shot of the tail

I thought she turned out pretty cute this time around. The beaded embellishments gave her some sparkle. I just hope my partner liked her. Especially considering how long it took me to get her done and sent. *Sigh*

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Well that about does it for this post. Whew! That was longer than I thought it would be. Guess I'm just trying to make up for my lack of posting most of the summer.

Thanks for reading and happy beading!