Number 6 on board!

Hi everyone,

It has been a busy week and a half! I went down to Va last week and cooked and partied and made a silk felted scarf, which I can't show you since I left it in Va (I think Carol's doggies wanted me to stay and one of them stole it out of my pile of things to be loaded into the car...the little stinker! I bet it was Marly!)

I started the weekend out at my little groupie, Terresa's house for her big birthday party! I helped her cook some of the buffet...made my paprika chicken with saffron rice! YUM!! Stayed up til 3:30 partying with the guests....and then we went to a international market on Sunday and got some steaks for dinner (yeah, the pioneer women recipes!) steak bites with mashers, YUM again!

On Monday, I went over to Carol Hamilton's house so we could play with her embellisher.....Terresa joined us and we ended up going to Alexanderia to the Fibre Space store for silk and wool roving. I also got some beautiful silk yarns to do kumihimo with. We also hit another international market..(that's what happens when Terresa is driving....) got some rose water and orange blossom water for some Moroccan recipes that I have been wanting to try. Lucked out and found some ginger cookies with lemon filling.....and YUM again! Great weekend so far!!

We all went back to Carol's and started our felting with the embellisher. It has 10 needles and no feed-dog so you can free sew with it. We worked for several hours working the roving onto the silk chiffon so we could then put it in the felting machine to felt. I got to wear mine to the local PMC guild meeting. Finally got home on Thursday and started work on my RAW for the week...

So...started one ring and everything was going fine until....dom, dom, dommmmm, the top piece broke into three pieces.....frustrating.....time to start a different ring....started that on Saturday....incorporated three of my favorite mediums...silver sheet, epoxy and polymer clay....my idea of stacking rings....I haven't written in silver so that was a experience that I need to practice, but I do like that it looks hand written...went through 3 drill bits and 5 saw blades. I realized that I should have written everything out with a smaller marker so my lines would have be more spot on and Bur Life would have helped, but all in all, not too bad... I was just going to use a polymer clay sheet that looks like flames but I decided to slide in a sheet of epoxy that had some gold glitter and red ink as a tint. It added a little bit of sparkle behind the openings in the letters. I then fit the polymer sheet so it shows the epoxy sheet as a border. I chemically bonded the whole thing together and then filed down the edges and applied 24kt gold leaf to the polymer edges. I buffed the polymer and I love the way the pattern looks 3-dimensional. I am going to try to finish another ring in the next couple of days since I have a 2-day class with Jeff Devers. My girl Gloria is taking the class too...we are going to have sooooo much fun!! It has been a while since I last saw her...she has been playing in Tucson for a month or so. Anyway, hope you like the ring....and that you are having fun in your studios...Kelly

P.S. I thought I would show you the photo Morgan took with my camera on Saturday morning before I started my second ring...I didn't find them until I downloaded my ring photos...I love the way the sunrise matches my ring colors....too funny, huh? K