Labour Day

Can you believe the end of summer is here so soon? It seems we were just getting started and already it's over. At least, that's the way it feels, now that Labour Day has arrived. We even got an extra week this year and still it seems that summer was too short. Probably because it was so darned cold and wet for most of the season here in Ontario.

Did you know that the Labour Day tradition was started in Canada in the 1870's as a result of labour disputes? In 1882, an American labour leader was here visiting, liked the idea and went home to New York and organized one of his own and thus the tradition was begun in the States. At least, that's what it says in Wikipedia.

How are you celebrating this last day of summer? My sister and I are headed off to another farm auction today. The listing refers to a "small anvil and a blacksmith vise" that will be included in the offerings. The last auction we went to had this "pegleg" vise, which Janine recognized from her iron sculpture/blacksmithing classes up in Haliburton which she has done several summers in a row now, but she stopped bidding on it just under $100, so it will be interesting to see what happens this time if the vise for sale is one that she thinks she needs to have. I'm looking forward to seeing what's available but I'm really going along to make sure she doesn't get carried away and buy one of the several horses that are on offer!

Vintage Buttons

I seem to be developing a taste for vintage buttons. When I was in Milwaukee last month, I picked up a few more to add to my growing collection. Several of them were vintage jet buttons like the one pictured on the right. I also got a brass button that is rather ornate in design but very small, it's less than an inch long. There is a mirror on the inside so that you can see a bit of a shine or sparkle in the openings.

What I didn't realize before was that there are such things as button clubs. When I Google the words "button club", there are over 70 MILLION entries!!! Granted, some of them are for things like the "Anti Benjamin Button Club" which is apparently for people who didn't like the recent Brad Pitt movie (who knew!?) but the majority are for people who collect buttons.

These clubs can be found all over the world. The website for the Oklahoma Button Club states that, "besides collecting buttons, our goal is to learn as much as we can about buttons, and to share this knowledge. We also wish to preserve buttons of the past, as well as appreciate the artists and craftsmanship of modern buttons."

The closest one to me appears to be located in the Toronto/Oshawa area and has been in existence for over 45 years!! Can you imagine? Someone recently told me that people used to collect buttons and now that women of a certain age are passing on or moving to retirement homes, their jars of buttons are becoming available. I have seen mason jars full of buttons in antique stores but didn't realize that they were someone's collection, I just figured the antique store owner had thrown a bunch of them together in a jar. I shall have to pay more attention next time I see one.

Making a Round Bead

As I mentioned last week, I was very excited last Thursday night at the Happy Hour Torching when I finally got the hang of making a round bead. For those of you that know I've been making lampwork beads for about two years now, you're probably saying "hey, it's about time!!?" A lot of my beads have been fairly round, it's not like I've never made one before, but lately it seemed I was having trouble doing it consistently. As you can see in the photo on the left, which are some of the very first beads I made in the first lampwork course I took back in August of 2007, some were round and several were oblong or barrel shaped. Back then, it was really hard for me to do a round bead and the barrel shape was just that much easier.

Two years, a few courses and lots of practice later, I can honestly say my bead making has improved and round is reasonably possible to achieve most of the time. But last week, I knew I had a couple that were absolutely perfectly round. Dwyn was showing another person how she gathers a quantity of glass first and then forms the bead, as opposed to the way I was used to making the bead, which was to wind the melted rod onto the mandrell. I had tried Dwyn's way before but for some reason, had gotten in the habit of using the winding method. So I decided to try doing a bigger gather and doing it the way Dwyn was demonstrating and lo and behold, the more perfect round bead was made. Here's the proof:

Just to prove that beads 1 and 2 weren't just a fluke, I made some more in different colours:

I'm not too keen on the rough looking holes that are left after cleaning the beads with the dremel (as you can see in the brown and turquoise bead in the centre of the photo above), I'll need to practice that a bit more, but gosh darn it, the beads are round and that's what really matters!

Goodies in the Mail Today

My purchases from Kate McKinnon's Soul Clearing Sale arrived in the mail today. If you read Kate's blog on August 22nd, you'll know that my package was one of the dozen or so she didn't have a chance to mail between the time when the sale ended and she went to visit a friend in California. Of course, by now I had already forgotten half of what I had bought, so it was a pleasant surprise to open the box and see what was in it!

Everyone that bought something in the sale also received a special thank you gift from Kate. My treat was this funky heart shaped lampwork bead. I don't know who made it, it might be Michelle Goldstein, Kate didn't say, but regardless, I quite like it. The really cool thing is, it goes almost perfectly with these beads I found at a bead store in the Beaches in the summer, I might have to string them together...

Scrabble Tiles

In my blog yesterday, I mentioned that I am looking for a used Scrabble game to buy to use the tiles to make pendants for jewellery. That reminded that in the article in the Handcrafted Jewelry magazine, they mentioned you could find them on eBay, so I went to check out the site. Boy, was I surprised to find 798 listing under "Scrabble tiles"!! Some are for the actual tiles, which seem to run about $20.00 for a full set of 100 letters, and others are for books about how to make jewellery pendants and listings by artists who are selling the pendants themselves! It seems the tiles are popular with scrapbookers, who knew?

Handcrafted Jewelry

Have you seen this new magazine from the editors of Beadwork? I subscribe to the daily newsletter from beadingdaily.com and first heard about it there, then saw it mentioned last week by Jen on the Beadfx blog (whose rave about it convinced me to go the beadingdaily email and click on the link to buy) and again this week in Cynthia Thornton's blog (who noticed it in the bookstore because it had two of Green Girl Studios' beads on the cover, the owl and the skeleton key on the necklace on the left).

I believe it's a special issue, rather than something that will be coming out regularly, but who knows? It's very interesting because it features a number of different mixed media techniques. I just got my copy yesterday and started looking through it at breakfast this morning, which made me late for work because I just couldn't put it down!

One project I can't wait to try is one making pendants out of Scrabble tiles. I was at a garage sale a couple of months ago and they had a bunch of games available and I didn't even think to pick up the Scrabble game until the next day - d'oh! So I've been on the lookout for another one ever since and of course, haven't seen hide nor hair of one but I will keep looking.

There is also a article about different types of resins. I picked up some Ice Resin from objects and elements when I took the course with Susan Lenart Kazmer back in June, but it was interesting to read about the other types out there.

Now all I've got to do is stop reading and start doing!! :)

New Month, New Budget

With the approach of September 1st, I've been feeling the need to get a few things in order. Maybe it's the whole "back to school" feeling, maybe it's the return of the cool weather (which seems to have only gone away for a week or two this year) or perhaps it's the fall equivalent of spring cleaning - I'm feeling the urge to get things organized and tidied up.

I'm starting with my money. I've been keeping a log of everything I spend my money on each day in a little notebook for about 2 years now. When I have the time or the inclination, I logged the information every week into an Excel spreadsheet. But it seems I never actually finish a spreadsheet, add up the final totals or do anything with the results.

Starting today, I'm going to keep recording things as I have been doing but I'm also going to follow a planned budget and see if I can live with the amounts that I have set for myself. I'm going to do this for the next four months, until the end of the year, and see what the results are. My goal is to pay down my credit card debt and I've allocated monthly amounts to do that. As an additional incentive for me, any money I save from my budgeted amounts will go into one of the mason jars I got at the farm auction a few weeks ago, which I have labelled "Laptop Fund" (up to $20, if it's more than that, I have to put it on the credit card). That's right, once I save up $1,000, I'm going to treat myself to a laptop (for hopefully less than $1,000 but I figure that's a good amount to work toward). I expect it will take me about a year to save that money because I've tried to funnel as much of my spare cash towards the credit cards and I've only got a few dollars a month left over once the budget is fully applied but we'll see. I'd like to have the laptop before my trip to France next August so that gives me 11 months to work with.

The Laptop Fund will also fill up with coins as I continue with someting I've also been doing for quite a while now. Every day, I empty my coin purse into the piggy bank. This actually adds up quite quickly because of our Canadian loonies and twonies (for my international readers, that's what we call our $1 and $2 coins). It's usually a few dollars a day, depending on how much shopping I do during the day.

I've also added a little incentive for myself with respect to my goal to be more active. I've taken the amount I've allocated for my weekly general expenditures and I've subtracted $40. Based on the idea that I'd like to work out at least 4 times per week, every time I do, I get $10 from that $40. Otherwise, I have to live without that extra cash and whatever amount I haven't earned that week by exercising, goes against my credit card instead. Obviously, I win either way but it means I may miss out on a few treats during the week.

I had been thinking up ways to use the dozen mason jars I got at the auction a few weeks ago. One of them is now holding my collection of sequins. A few of them have been used to help sort out the various nuts and bolts that I also obtained at the auction, but I still had at least 5 of them available for use. It had occurred to me that I could use them somehow for my budget and then this past weekend, my mother happened to mention a woman on TV who teaches people how to get out of debt and said she uses a jar system. She wasn't sure which show it was, but one of the links below is from "Til Debt Do Us Part" with Gail Vax Oxlade and I found several of the articles very interesting and helpful. If you Google the words "money jars", you'll get lots of results as well.

The bottom line is, you can do whatever you want with your money, you just can't spend more than you make. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

My credit card debt is still manageable, which is why I'd like to do this now instead of letting things get out of control. I'd like to start saving up for major purchases in advance, instead of buying first and paying off later. But first things first, learning to work with the budget. I'll keep you posted as I go along. It's day one and already there is $11.70 in the laptop fund and I've earned my first $10 from the exercise fund, I'm pretty excited!

Here are a couple of links, in case you want to try something like this out for yourself:

http://moneyjarbudget.com/2009/05/how-to-organize-your-money-jar-budget/

http://www.gailvazoxlade.com/articles_f/article31-2.htm