Product Photography Shoots and New Work
It's been a very busy couple of weeks!  I had a custom order for a friend bumped up from a Christmas deadline to a Thanksgiving deadline (!)  and had to get cracking on that.  She and her kids had collected quartz from her grandmother's back yard and tumbled it in a hobby rock-tumbler.  One of them was heart-shaped, and I was asked to set it in something to give

Of Socks and Stones. Alas, no sealing wax, nor cabbages and kings.
My new "rocks" arrived a good week ago, and I'm still thinking hard about what I want to use them for, other than the classic "variations on a theme."  I've been doing some of that just to keep myself in the right headspace, and I think it's starting to work.  I'm feeling glimmerings of inspiration for Monday! The stone in the ring on the left is a

Pretty rocks!
I finally got the package of faceted stones I've been waiting for!  Now that I'm a little more comfortable with setting them I want colors!  I now have amethyst, citrine, peridot, and two different garnets (almandine and pyrope).   This week had lots of doctor's appointments and other obligations, so I didn't get to do any work in the studio until Friday :(

Pressure Cooker Chicken Stew-ish
 Another dish in my "Seat-of-my-Pants" cooking repertoire!  Not exactly stew, I suppose - not with the whole chicken legs.  Still, it's really fast and really tasty!  I end up cooking a lot of chicken this way.  DH can't eat pork or beef in any form except ground, and won't eat seafood except shrimp, so we're pretty much stuck with chicken, hamburgers and hot dogs.  I have perforce become adept at cooking chicken in many different ways.  I'm sure the nuances are completely lost on DH, as he tends to slather barbecue sauce on all his chicken no matter what I've done with it - but at least I don't have to get tired of chicken!

Adventures in Handmade Laundry Soap
For the past couple of months I have been making my own cleaning products.  The more you put into something the more it costs, so if I could pare my cleaning supplies down to bare essentials it ought to cost me less than buying typical cleaning products.  I figured people were able to keep reasonably clean for hundreds of years before the invention of modern detergents - there must be a way to do this.  So far I think I'm right!  It turns out that almost everything can be made from some combination of soap or dish liquid, washing soda, borax and vinegar.  As I mentioned in my previous post about