Going to the B & B Show!

I'm going to the Bead and Button show! I have wanted to go to this show for years, and it always falls during the last week of school. This year, I found that I would end the year without using any of my precious personal leave days, and that just wouldn't do - they don't carry over from one year to the next. A day not used, is a day lost. Hmmmmmm..... my chance to take off a few days during the show. I'll be in Milwaukee Monday through late Thursday night, then head in for one day (the last of the year!) to work.

Today, pack. Gotta clean out my car, then stuff if full of tools and stuff I'll need for workshops each day - oh, and my toothbrush and a few clothes, I guess, too!

I will post some pictures from the show and classes this week.

Discovery!!

I found a very cool bead shop only about 20 miles from my house, in Taylor's Falls, MN, today. I had no idea it was there until last week when a co-worker asked me if I'd ever been there. I do most of my buying online, and don't get to Taylor's Falls too often - it's a touristy town near my favorite State Park, Interstate Park (the Wisconsin side is where the best part of the park is). Until now, the only thing that had attracted me to the actual town was that it has some sport bars for watching games, and since MN is non-smoking, I would drive there before I would sit in a smoky WI bar.

But now .... an awesome bead store. I thought of it when I ended up in a bind this weekend, being unable to find my 1mm black leather cord, and needing it to finish an order. The store is called The Non Necessities of Life, and they have no phone and no web site.... but it is a very well stocked store, with good prices and a nice selection. I ended up spending an hour there and could have stayed longer, when I only meant to quickly run in for my leather cord.

I'm all the colors of the world...

I love the Color Song by Kira Wiley. And I was going to do my next blog on color schemes and some of the tools I've found fun and useful, but I am now the Tutorial Tuesday editor for the WistEsty Blog Wisconsin Street Team - "The Moo Crew". I've decided to turn that idea into a tutorial that will run next Tuesday, since I will now need to find tutorials to run every other Tuesday.

Let's see - I think I am purple today - bright and happy like a butterfly!

Today I will notice ...

shades of spring green.

I'm a little bit stuck creatively, due to time constraints of my educational work, which gets more of my time than my artistic work. Whew. I just read a tip at a great post on motivation that I love and I'm copying it here with a link to it:

"...try and find the pattern between things, and connect the dots between random things just for fun when stuck in a rut. Like when I see the color yellow, and I start to focus on finding yellow things — stuff that I didn’t notice before will show themselves to me. I’m heightening my sense of awareness because I’m narrowing my focus to one thing."

This is something easy to do and it plays into creativity.... Lately I have been noticing color. I found some great color tools, too, that I'll share in my next post.

So, on with the day.

Reading rules

Today I learned that 1st grade readers will apply the rules to unknown words when you don't want them to. Big Al, a large and ugly fish with no friends, decided to wrap himself in seaweed as a disguise and thereby get other fish to talk to him. But alas, in this reading, it seems that poor Al was raped in the seaweed. Silent 'w', then followed by a misuse of the consonant-vowel-consonant-e (cvce) rule that makes the vowel long (they haven't heard of the doubling the final consonant yet, so it was just ignored) and you - or Big Al - gets raped instead of wrapped.

So, I get home from all that and find my energy lacking. Creativity, for me, takes time and definitely take energy. I'm looking forward to summer and that time I need.