Dallas Craft Guild just earned a new fan

As I write this, I’m sitting in the Dallas airport waiting for my flight to board. I’m on the tail end of a truly wonderful weekend of teaching at the Craft Guild of Dallas. This class has been in the works for quite some time; a few Guild members took one of my classes at the 2009 Glass Craft and Bead Expo, and wanted to bring me out to Dallas to continue the beadmaking fun we had in Vegas. So, after almost a year of planning and scheduling, we decided on 3 days, in 2 parts: my 2 day Shaping, Encasing, and Color class, along with a 1 day optional add-on class that covered how I use enamels to create un-glassy effects with glass. (This has since become the Un Glassy Glass Class, coming up at 2010 GCE in Vegas, and in May at Brea Bead Works). Oh my, we had a BLAST. This is the first time I’ve been lucky enough to have the same group of students for 3 continuous days, and it was so nice to get to see my students really sink their teeth into the class. I can’t wait to see pictures from the last round of beads we made on Sunday in the enamels class: sculpted Roman-glass-looking vessels, textured rocks, and marbles are what I’m particularly excited to see.

What makes the Guild awesome? Lots. It’s been around for more than 50 years, teaching classes in lampworking, ceramics, jewelry design, silversmithing, painting, bookbinding and alteration, and much more that I can’t remember. Each studio is well-equipped and well-designed. The staff is enthusiastic, and each studio has an open door; teachers and students alike are excited to discuss their projects. The collaborative and creative energy is certainly contagious. If and when I head back to Dallas to teach another class, I’m sticking around for a while to be a student, and take advantage of the wealth of information and equipment at the Guild! Many thanks to my generous hosts/ students/ friends for making the trip to Dallas such a wonderful one!

Back to regular life

The Best Bead Show (and the rest of the Tucson Gem & Mineral Shows) came and went, and I started the slow process of tuning back in to non-Gem show life. Over the last couple weeks, I slept a lot, slept some more, put my house and studio back together, took a nap, taught a quick class at Sonoran Glass, did a ton of paperwork, took another nap, and started working on my website again. The sleep deficit has been remedied, and I’m back in the studio- two things that sometimes take me a while to do after the February shows each year. Ahhh. Gem show done. It’s always wonderful, but I’m always happy to get back to regular life.


A while back I mentioned starting the process of updating my website, and to make everything work the way its supposed to.  That's hard to do... so I recruited and found local help to both assist me with the update, and teach me about the program that runs my site.  He's oddly a family member of the guy from whom I purchased my house and studio. Small world, eh? We’re working on giving the site a little bit of a facelift- adding more pictures, a few new features, and most importantly, making the store a bit easier to navigate. We’re making a ton of changes to the site, and Peter, the man behind the curtain, has set up a few things that make the site easier for me to maintain. I’m so excited for this project to be done- Peter has done such a great job, and I’m delighted to share it with you as soon as we finish up the last few edits, and push that ‘on’ button sometime soon. I’d like the site to be live before I head off to teach at the Craft Guild of Dallas next week. We’ll see…

With the launch of the new website, I’ll have a handful of new work available, including a new batch of butterflies. I’m painting wings today, along with flameworking a few Maze marbles and Doodlebeads to paint later this week. Yup, that’s what I’m up to- just plugging away.  No big news, and that's just fine with me.  Wishing all of you beautiful days!