Happy Holidays - Christmas Eve Post

I began my long holiday break after work today, won't be back in the office until Jan 5th.

Both of my adult children are here, with their respective significant others, for Christmas. Fortunately for me, their SO's families live near by. The gifts are wrapped and under the tree, which still needs to be decorated - my daughter and I will do it today. We've a very, um, eclectic selection of ornaments including strange sequined animals, Star Trek, delicate hand painted glass, and billiards themed. It will be a special tree...to say the least.

I have a couple things I want to accomplish over the break, one is to figure out my California Sales Tax return (due at the end of January) and get it filed and paid. I didn't make that many sales this year, unfortunately, but I want to establish the part time business as legitimate since I do deduct expenses on my federal tax return. I am hopeful that I'll have the opportunity to do 3 or 4 conventions next year - I've gotten an email from the dealer's room coordinator for the World Fantasy Convention that will be local that I'm on the mailing list. I know to keep an eye open for LosCon much earlier this year and I'll check out BayCon again, which was a lot of fun last May. The other con I had hoped to sell at is Potlatch coming up in February, and I haven't gotten any response from the dealer's room coordinator yet, so I'm worried I might not get a space, again...oh well, keeping my fingers crossed!

The other thing is to try and get my workspace sorted out - the room I use for beading is also my home office and prior to getting into beading served as a "library" of sorts for my books (I am a voracious reader and my collection is probably over a thousand books as I can't seem to part with any of them - although a lot are in the garage and in storage). There are also bins of office supplies and other stuff that came home with me when I was moved out of a closed office into a cubicle and then just miscellaneous stuff that I can't find a place for elsewhere in the house and don't want to put in the garage. I'd really like to move out all the books, set up a fairly long and deep table surface for a beading workspace, get some shelving for all the supplies and maybe a pegboard for tools. If I can get a start on it next week, I can do the rest in phases over the weekends. Of course, it's been rainy and if the weather stays that way, it will mean moving stuff outside, prior to deciding if it goes to the garage or elsewhere, will be a problem.

So, before I finish this post, which might be the last one for a few days, here's my most recent finished project.

I started this in Fayetteville last week, it's a bit labor intensive so I didn't finish it there. I thought it was a fun use of the two different sized circle spacers from Bead Gallery.

I used red and green roundel beads inside the larger circle spacer bead, like a bead frame, and smaller glass beads with silver linings in the small circle spacers along with a solid silver metal disk between them, all on silver plated eye pins joined with Beadalon EZLinks. A larger EZLink attaches the final loop to the eyeglass holders. Finished length is 30"