If at First you don't Succeed........

"Every mistake has a halfway moment,

a split second when it can be recalled

and perhaps remedied."

- Pearl S. Buck

I've been working on the necklace portion of the jewelry piece for Opie and Linda O'Brien's book. The pendant for it is finally finished. I plan on completing the necklace and shipping it off to them this week. Yesterday, I was in 'creative mode,' so I started to design the clasp for the piece. I'll bet I spent well over an hour hammering, bending, twisting, and forming rebar tie wire (which for those of you who have ever worked with it, know full-well how horrible it is to work with). Finally, after a lot of fine-tuning to get the stupid thing 'just right', I was satified with the design. I pinched the wires together where I planned to wire-wrap it, and....you guessed it.....SNAP! The wire broke!!! I guess with all the hammering and bending I had done to it, I overworked the wire and it weakened and snapped! So that was the end of 'creative mode' for me for the rest of the day. Today I went down to the studio with all good intentions of starting on another one, but each time I looked at it, I procrastinated and decided that tomorrow would be a much better day to work on it.

When that's finished, I've got to get busy and pump out 43 chunky book pages which are due around the 20th of this month for a swap, and also a bunch of charms and ATC's for some swaps in October. All these items are for my good friend Kim Nugent's upcoming 'Raevns Nest Art Retreat' which is going to be held October 16-19 in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Check out the website for it at http://www.raevns-nest-art-retreat.com/home.html. She's got the following instructors lined up to teach workshops during the retreat: Bernie Berlin, Michael deMeng, Jill Berry, Judy Wise, and Laurie Mika. I'm really looking forward to it, but I guess I better get my 'rear in gear' to get my stuff made for it!!!

My daughter, Jessica, came by to visit me this afternoon. She brought me an 'In the Loss of Your Pet' sympathy card, along with this book: "dogfessions - secret confessions from dogs." She is such a thoughtful girl!! This book is very similar in style to the book, "A lifetime of Secrets: A Postsecret Book" by Frank Warren, and is based on the website http://www.dogfessions.com/, which is a collection of handmade postcards that reveal the deepest confessions from dogs and their owners. The postcards are really cute.

I would also like to thank those of you who posted comments on my last post about losing my beloved Otis. It meant a lot to me to read your kind words of encouragement.