Busy and Blessed

Vintaj Blog Designer Highlight

I am the featured designer today over at the vintaj blog, visit the above link to check out my very first interview/article and share in my excitement!!  I'm so thrilled. This has truly been an amazing week. In addition to having my first feature article, I also received word that one of my submissions (also a vintaj design) is going to be in the Feb 2012 edition of Bead Trends magazine. It was my first attempt at submitting a design, so its pretty amazing and awesome that it was picked! Hopefully I can make a habit of that and get things submitted every month and maybe have a few items in throughout the course of next year.  My first downtown arts market event went great as well. There was no advertising, but I still managed to make a few bucks, and everyone told me later that my booth was a hit and received a lot of traffic. I didn't realize...I guess I was too busy with customers. ; )     Here's the booth set up, which is still a work in progress:

In addition to having all of this going on, we tiled the kitchen floor this weekend. Everything went great and it looks beautiful...but we forgot to account for the added height it added to the floor, and our refrigerator now doesn't fit under the cabinet where it is supposed to go...so we are going to have to rethink our layout and design. Right now its in a completely different spot, and its actually growing on me, it seems like it really opens up the feel of the space as well as the views into the other rooms. You can see in this photo where it is now as well as the pretty new floor - tiles are 17 inch tiles that we got from Knox rail salvage for $1.99 each, wow!  We love how it looks so much like slate, but its ceramic tile. Anyway, the refrigerator originally was on the left, and it would stick out so far that it made it seem very narrow, and it blocked the view into the living room area, which is now opened up. The den also now has a view of the refrigerator and pantry, so if the boys are trying to sneak sweets or something, its easier to stop that now.

Now, today I have a lot on my plate. I have to get my necklace ready to send to Bead Trends for photography, set up a home inspection for some buyers I'm working with who are buying an amaing house (another blessing in my life that could not have happened at a better time, otherwise I would have had to retire my license this year due to not being able to afford my dues/fees) and do about 3 bpo reports, fun stuff! Once all that is off my plate though, I just got some new Vintaj products from beadaholique that I'm dying to try out, and I plan on doing my first "how to" series, so stay tuned! 

The design dream

I've been making a lot of custom jewelry lately, and I always spend a long time during my design process, but its even worse for custom orders, because I'm so anxiety ridden over everything being perfect. I'm not sure what is normal as far as time goes, because I've never watched anyone else in the design process before. I know mine can be frustrating at times, but it can also be inspired design, and sometimes I even exceed my own expectations, which probably aren't as high as they should be, because for some reason my brain seems to be programmed with a cap on what success I can achieve or what goals are even appropriate. I suppose this is because of the fact that there are many artists in my family who have struggled, so it was as if growing up, to want to be an artist or anything in the arts industry would be a huge gamble and a waste of money, an unattainable pipe dream, and therefore I just wrote myself off as not quite talented enough. Which is really sad. Because now I look at some of the things that I created, on my own, designs born 100% (or at least 90%)  from my own imagination, and I practiced everyday in being creative, to think outside the box, to do something different, and I think maybe that worked pretty well for me so far. I haven't had the opportunity to get any training at all yet. I have design ideas coming out of the wazoo, but I don't have the tools in my toolbox yet that are needed to execute them...when I do have them...watch out cause I'm going to be taking the jewerly world by storm!  In the meantime, I'm going to just keep plugging away and doing custom orders, and maybe one day my higher aspirations will be realized and maybe they won't be, but this design dream is mine to own now, and I'm not going to be hanging it on the shelf anytime soon.  : )

A Day in Knoxville with Don and the boys

We went to Knoxville today to pick up the porcelain tiles we purchased from Rail Salvage, and then took the boys up to the Norfolk Southern Hump Yard to see if we could show the boys the trains and huge roundabout and such, but really weren't able to get that close. We stopped by the old depot though and checked out the exterior of the museum trains, because it was open by appointment only. We walked around downtown for a bit and then took the kids to Zuma, which I'd heard was cool, but we found it to be quite disappointing, and nearly half of the games were out of order.

Overall it was at least a day without typical boredom being at home, and both the boys, as well as Don and I, were happy to have a break from the normal routine, especially since the first full day of school is tomorrow for Jaidon! Here are some pics from Knoxville that I took.