Flood Waters

Most of my regular readers know I'm located in the northern reaches of Colorado, so I'm sure some have been waiting for an update. We are fine, but we've been surrounded by deep flood waters on all sides for many days now. We live on the side of a hill, so the water has gone around us and downwards without much problem. Our yard squishes when we walk on it, but that's fairly normal here after any substantial rain. Coal Creek is less than a half a mile from our house and had some pretty intense flooding. It used to be ten feet down in a ravine, where as now it's ground level and above and has gone from ten feet wide to fifty feet wide. Last I saw, whole sides of the bank walls had been sheared off and were gone, but that was a few days ago and I've not really left the house since aside from walking the dogs around the block.

So in other news, I put in an admissions application to art school last week. I always said I was going to get an art degree, but never did it. Really, if I'd gone to college right out of high school I would have either failed out or dropped out and that would have been a waste of time and money. Now that I've got some time and motivation, I'm ready to follow that dream. I'll be focusing on a Fine Art degree with a focus on sculpture. I like to think it will help with all the neat prosthetic makeup I want to learn, and designing and crafting pieces for Comic Con and all the other stuff I like to make with my hands.

We started potty training Youngest Daughter a little over a week ago. As of right now, she's weirded out by urinating without a diaper on that she jumps up and runs away from her potty before she's done. So the potty is sitting in the foyer of our house on tile floor for easy clean up. Her awareness has really come along, so hopefully getting her to realize when she needs to go and being okay with going in a toilet and not her diaper will fall into place pretty soon. 

I haven't been doing much glass lately. I have about ten beads sitting in water waiting to be cleaned but I've ignored them for more than a week. I have been doing a fair amount of experimenting with new polymer clay designs, things for Comic Con and things for my regular Etsy sales. 

Speaking of polymer clay, I was looking at polymer clay cuff bracelets online yesterday to see what's popular and what's been done too much and what hasn't been done. Gathering ideas, so to speak. I've noticed that a LOT of polymer clay cuff bracelets are only decorated on the outside and I've come to wonder... Why? The inside is highly visible in a cuff bracelet, particularly if someone asks to look at it up close. Also, the inside is a whole separate potential canvas- even if it's just a plain accent color to set off the outside design. When attaching clay to metal, you must first coat the metal with glue so the clay will adhere - leaving the back unfinished greatly increases the chance that something could get between the clay and the cuff and it could crack or break, or the whole outside may come off. Then all the time and energy spent designing it would be wasted. I plan to use other people's design neglect to my benefit. 

Here's the inside of a pendant I made the other day. I took it out and discarded it because it was only an experiment and I scratched it while I was messing with it, but it's got good design potential for lots of uses and I plan to expand upon it. Please pardon the blurry picture, I took it one-handed with my phone.

So yeah. All is well here, all things considered. Been busy, but will hopefully have more time for creation and updates in the near future. Thanks for stopping by!