New Shawl Pin Design

Here is my latest shawl pin design.  I made them using my new "Now That's a Jig".  I choked on the price of the jig, but it works beautifully and is easier to use than my homemade jigs of nails hammered into pieces of wood.  I've got a lot of experimenting to do with it.

A Bevy of Bracelets

I recently watched a session of Craftcast with Alison Lee called Patina Playtime where she made some cool bracelets from brass cuff blanks.  I decided to make some of my own, and I'm happy with the way they turned out.

My new website

Finally it's finished.  I took my new website live today.  You can check it out at:
www.cynthiablanton.com

Adventure at Balls Falls

I just completed the four-day Balls Falls Thanksgiving Festival (Canadian Thanksgiving) and it ended up with an unusual adventure.  After three beautifully sunny but cold days, it rained on Monday and turned the grounds into a muddy mess.  Around 3:30pm, a very large van tried to exit the area and managed to slip and slide right into my tent!!!!!  The guy had tried a couple of times to get through the somewhat narrow opening between my tent and the cars parked along the side, and each time his bald tires let him slip closer to me.  Finally he hit one of my tent poles.  I screamed at him to stop, and fortunately he did.  There was no way he could go backwards or forwards without sliding further into my tent which was staked firmly into the ground.  The only solution was to take my tent down and hope that the pole wasn't damaged.  With some help from the show personnel, I packed up all my inventory, broke down the displays and emptied the tent.  We removed all the stakes and weights and when the tent was free of restraints, we picked it up and moved it about a foot and a half away from the van.  This was my first time to use the tent, and I had worried about all kinds of things except getting hit by a van!  It turned out that the tent pole and zipper were fine, so now I just have a couple of muddy side walls to clean up.

Mokume gane pendants and earrings

I'm preparing for some shows this fall and these pendants and earrings are some of my new works. They are in the Julie Picarello style of mokume gane technique.  For those who don't know, you make a stack of different colors of polymer clay and poke holes in it.  Then you take shavings from the stack and use them to make your objects.  It's a fun technique because you never know quite what you will get.

My new tent

Some of the best shows in my area are outdoors, so I have made the investment in a tent.  Not just any pop-up for me.  No, I splurged on a LightDome tent that is actually waterproof instead of merely water resistant.  My one experience with a typical pop-up tent supplied by a show organizer was disastrous - it started leaking profusely as soon as it started raining.  My husband and I put the tent together for the first time yesterday and I'm happy to say there was a minimum of yelling and swearing.  The tent is quite tall so hubby's 6'6" height was a major advantage.

Flower Shawl Sticks

I've been away from home for about three weeks caring for my 90-year-old mother.  While I was at her house, I did manage to do a bit of claying and here are the results:  shawl sticks which can also be used as hair sticks.

The pansies or violas are colored with Genesis Heat Set Oils and the flowers below are colored with soft pastels.

This is the display I will use to show them off at craft shows: