Wishful Thinking Sunday

I wish there was no such thing as war. But there is. So on this Memorial Day weekend, The Husband and I went to the relatively new Lyon Air Museum in Costa Mesa. Here are a few shots of our visit:

Reminds me of MASH~btw, my dad was in Korea.

The Husband and a German vehicle-those middle wheels actually helped in hilly terrain.

Something to keep up morale in the 40's, the Helms Bakery truck, complete with cooling racks and bread shelves!

An aerial view of some of the planes

A wedding dress made out of a fiance's parachute

No caption required!

This museum only opened last fall but it had a constant stream of visitors this morning. The docents are very helpful and you'll enjoy all the history this place has to offer. It's on the far side of John Wayne Airport, really easy to get to. Would make a great Father's Day destination for those of you near the OC!

Do What You Love!

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Entertainment Saturday

Happy Ending No Longer Required

My definition of a happy ending has changed in recent years. It used to be if the couple didn't end up walking arm and arm into the sunset, then I'd just wasted a whole chunk of my life. I wanted to leave the theatre knowing that love will conquer all, from ex girlfriends to volcano's. If I couldn't wax rhapsodic at the water cooler the next morning, then what was the point?

Now, however, I'm not such a stickler for the facile story and easy ending. Those have their places~sometimes you just need a predictable, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back kinda story. But I have begun to appreciate a deeper story with more complicated characters and meaningful themes. Without total spoilers, some movies I've liked recently without the traditional happy endings have been: (500) Days of Summer, Waitress, Whip It, Adam and Fur.

Sometimes it's enough to leave a theatre or put the DVD back in the Netflix envelope, being happy that the main character made it through the bad times, learned lessons and is usually ready to move on to better days.

What movies have you seen lately without the traditional happy ending?

Do What You Love!

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Days of Skulls and Roses

At the Bead Society meeting last Saturday, a new bead challenge was announced. Sponsored by Jesse James (the bead company, not the shmuck, as Kat said), we each get a strand of beads. The strands are in different color groupings and contain a few fire polished, a few faux pearls and some other types of glass beads. We have to use the entire strand plus any other beads and embellishments we want to.

It didn’t take me long to grab a strand of pinks. Ever since my flirtation with a neon fuchsia Christmas tree last year, I’m likin’ pink a lot. At home, I went through my charms to come up with a theme and I found the coolest silver skulls with rose designs. And in a completely different bag, I found a skull and roses pendant. Oh boy! I’m on my way.

Of course, there’s always the possibility I’ll decide on a different theme, but I doubt it. I really like the name, Days of Skulls and Roses!

I’ll post updates as I work. Since the Orange County Fair necklace is done, I can start on the Bead Society challenge this weekend. I think it’s actually called the Go Make Something Great challenge and it’s not due till late August, so I have plenty of time.

Do What You Love!

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8 Things Thursday

Written sitting outside over the weekend

8 Things It’s Fun to Look Up At

1 Birds on wires

2 Clouds

3 Architecture

4 Tree tops swaying in the breeze

5 Airplanes (imagining where they’re going)

6 Towering sunflowers

7 Kites bobbing through the air

8 Rainbows (I’ll stand in the middle of the street in the pouring rain to see a rainbow)

Do What You Love!

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Life on Etsy Tuesday

Bear Chick Sundries

Guess what?! I opened yet another shop on Etsy! It’s called Bear Chick Sundries and I’m slowly filling it with vintage items I pick up on my yard saling expeditions and destash from scads of crafting projects I’ve moved on from over the years.

Originally, I envisioned it as fairly bare bones, meaning I wasn’t going to put much money into promotion. But I’ve had pretty good luck advertising on Craftcult.com, a website that tracks your Etsy sales, hearts and other stats and I thought I might do a week of advertising with them once I get a few pages worth of goodies in the shop. Which means I’d need a graphic “button” to have installed on their site. If I was going to have that made, I might as well have a shop banner made, too. So, I zipped over to the Etsy shop where I’ve had my other banners created, Bearcengic, found a banner I liked (see above) and requested a special order of banner and button. Vanessa at Bearcengic had me hooked up within a couple of hours.

So, I’ve got to get moving and start filling up Bear Chick Sundries with more of my supplies that need new homes, plus the rings and scrimshaw my mother gave me recently.

Here’s a peek at what you’ll find at Bear Chick Sundries:

3 strand Rhinestone spacers

Aqua Blue Vintage Earrings

Lily and Rhinestone Pin

Drop by often because as I go to yard sales and clean out my craft room, you never know what I’ll find!

Do What You Love!

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Extra Extra!!

How serendipitous that I found this blog giveaway on the day I feature encouraging quotes! On Angela Cartwright’s blog (yes, of Lost in Space and Make Room for Daddy fame), she is giving away a new book that she and her studio are featured in, called Book of Inspiration, by Jo Packham and Jenny Doh.

All you need to do to enter is leave a comment on Angela’s blog, letting her know what your favorite inspirational saying is. So dust off your quote books, log onto Said and Done and start quotin’!

Do What You Love!

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Encouraging Words Monday

Trust that you are on the right path and know that it is right,

simply because you are on it.

Do What You Love!

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Quick OC Fair Update

Here are a few pix of the work in progress on the second necklace for this summer’s Orange County Fair entries.

I’m combining gold and silver to mix it up a little and add some interest.

The focal beads are so colorful! I think I’m likin’ this design, after a rough start.

Do What You Love!

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8 Things Thursday

8 Excuses… I Mean Reasons… I Haven’t Been Blogging

1 Reading mysteries

2 Getting samples ready to promote my jewelry class in August

3 American Idol (both nights!)

4 Counting calories (math was not my favorite subject…)

5 Working on the necklace for this years Orange County Fair

6 Exercising

7 Cleaning closets

8 Feeding cats, raccoons, possums and The Husband, not necessarily in that order

Do What You Love!

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Encouraging Words Monday

Go around asking a lot of damn fool questions and taking chances. Only through curiosity can we discover opportunities and only by gambling can we take advantage of them.

Clarence Birdseye

Do What You Love!

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8 Things Thursday

8 Things I Like in a Salad (besides lettuce)

1 Cucumber
2 Cranberries
3 Walnuts
4 Dressing (I used to hate dressing)
5 Cheese (just a little)
6 Spinach
7 Croutons
8 Corn

Do What You Love!


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Life on Etsy Tuesday

Now that Mother's Day has passed, I can show you what I made for The Mom. She loved it! I made the chain from aluminum jump rings and ...

... I got this magnificent leaf from JasGlassArt at Etsy, who I featured a few weeks ago here. I'm still in love with her screen door bugs!

And here’s a tip regarding Treasury curating on Etsy--While you’re building the Treasury, you cut and paste the item numbers to the Treasury screen. I suggest also pasting the list of the numbers to a Word doc, just in case something like this happens to you~~I had the whole Treasury made, hit the create button and ZAP! There was an error in publishing that wiped out the entire thing. GRRRRR… Lesson learned!

Do What You Love!

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PS-Yes, I'm aware that it's Wednesday...

Saturday Entertainment

Well, I finally started a new mystery series, The Bryant and May books, by Christopher Fowler. The first book, Full Dark House, delves into this London detective teams beginnings during the Blitz while solving a present day murder.

Arthur Bryant and John May, now both nearing their 80's, met during WWII, when they were assigned to the Peculiar Crimes Unit, a ragtag group of police and forensics people who worked on unusual, time consuming crimes at the height of the London bombings.

Reading this book made me realize what the citizens of London actually lived with on a daily basis during the nightly German attacks. And weaving it all into a modern day bombing of their own offices brought the two timelines together nicely.

Darkness plays a huge role in this story. London was largely dark at night, to avoid creating targets for the German bombing raids. And darkness envelopes an old Victorian theatre where members of the cast of a scandalous production of Orpheus and their loved ones are targets for a crazed, ghostly killer.

Is the Greek shipping magnate who's financing the show exacting some revenge through the Greek gods and goddesses on stage? Or is there really a ghost terrorizing the company? And how does this all tie in with the modern day bombing and death of Arthur Bryant, John May's partner of 60 years?

As always, I'm drawn to this book because of it's characters. Bryant is a flighty but brilliant detective, whose mind is more attuned to strange and far fetched theories than the feelings of the people around him. May balances his anti-social ways with a calm and likable personality and a methodical detecting technique. Together, they pool their thoughts and theories to catch the bad guys.

I’m already on the second book, The Water Room. But I found out my library is missing the fourth book-sounds like a trip to Amazon will be in order soon…

Do What You Love!

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Bear Chick Friday

I'm inspired by all kinds of things but lately I've been wanting to work with some really cool beads I got a few weeks ago in LA. They feel like stone ~ I think they're a conglomeration of different colored stones. I got them in purple, blue and pink. Just loved the colors! Naturally.

This week, I managed to make one necklace and combined some of the pink beads with black chain and black rubber tubing. Here's a sneak peek:

Now I'm playing with the purple ones and a different black chain. And maybe some violet chain. I haven't finished playing yet!

Do What You Love!

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8 Things Thursday

8 Favorite Live Concerts

I snagged tickets for Adam Lambert and Orianthi at the Pacific Amphitheatre this summer! Woo hoo!

1 Eddie Izzard (comedy)

2 The Bangles

3 Fleetwood Mac

4 Tony Bennett

5 The Chieftains

6 Harry Chapin

7 James Taylor (with a surprise appearance by Carly Simon, when they were still married-yes, I was a babe in arms…)

8 Brian Setzer

And bonus WORST concert--Jefferson Whatever (can't remember if they were touring as Starship or Airplane…) No harmonies, Gracie was high as a kite. Awful. The best thing about it was an acoustic set featuring my favorite drummer, Kenny Aronof.

Do What You Love!

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Life on Etsy Tuesday

*sigh* Photography, for me, is an ongoing learning experience. I’m still working on improving the pictures I take but here’s some observations about pix for Etsy:

1. No blurry pictures! I cringe when I look at Etsy items sitting on someone’s floor or sofa, blurred with no detail--and only one picture!

blurry

2. Dark or bad color. I’ve re-edited or totally retaken photos when I’ve realized that the image is either too dark or the color is too blue or green. Maybe it’s just my camera or setup but sometimes it does that odd color thing and I don’t notice until it’s on the site.

blue tint

3. Different viewpoints. I try to include one “artistic” shot--an interesting angle or close up of a detail--sometimes to use as the primary shot to draw attention to the item when they’re being seen in listings.

close up

4. Use as many pix as possible. With some of my simpler items, 2 or 3 can suffice. But buyers (me included) like to see lots of angles, details and even the backs of items. I never understand when someone only uses one picture.

back of the pin

5. Consistency. This one I get very low marks on. I’ve tried to come up with a consistent background for my photos-neutral colored fabric, different papers--and I haven’t found anything that works for me as a signature “look” for my shop.

I love the new feature on Etsy, that allows you to upload all 5 pictures at once, like Flickr, instead of one at a time, like we’ve had to. And it’s also easier to arrange them in the order you want them seen since it’s now a drag and drop system as opposed to clicking arrows to move pictures individually. Hooray, Etsy!

Are you going to go look at my Etsy shop pictures now? I blush because some of my older items are not as good as the newer ones. And, like I said, I’m still working on perfecting the images every time I post a new piece of jewelry. All I can do is Keep on Tryin’!

Do What You Love!

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Encouraging Words Monday

Being realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity.

Will Smith

Do What You Love!

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Sunday Wishful Thinking

I wish I could afford:

1. A jacket by Seth Aaron Henderson, the most recent Project Runway winner

2. A $4000 bead tour of Australia being organized by a bead store in SoCal (plus another $4k to bring The Husband)

3. To quit my job and be creative full time.

Do What You Love!

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Entertainment Saturday (Belated)

Earlene Fowler’s Love Mercy--An appeal for another adventure

I read this book when it first came out and I loved it. The paperback is coming out this Tuesday and in her recent newsletter (view that HERE), Earlene said the publisher hasn’t requested a sequel but I think if you read this book, you’ll want to take another trip with these characters.

Love Mercy is still grieving the loss of her husband when her long lost granddaughter sweeps into town with a stolen banjo and an attitude. (see the entire review on my other blog HERE) The book revolves around 3 women, all with stories to tell and hearts to mend, but it’s not a romance by any stretch of the imagination.

My first brush with Earlene’s work was the Benni Harper quilting mysteries, which take place in Central California and features museum director and rancher Benni, her husband, Gabe, the chief of police and assorted friends and relatives, including her spitfire grandma, Dove. The newest Benni book, State Fair, is also coming out this Tuesday! Hooray! I’ve missed that girl. The Saddlesmakers’ Wife, a stand alone book, was also a good story with a strong heroine.

So, give Love Mercy a read, if you will. Then maybe Earlene’s publisher will beg her for another tale of strong women on the California coast! Here’s where to find it on Amazon.

Do What You Love!

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