Hi Everyone!

Hello! Once again, way too much time has gone by in between my postings...eeek! That is not good. I hope everyone had a good Halloween! We handed out candy but it seems like we get fewer and fewer trick-or-treaters each year. The first year we were in our house, we had close to 100 kids come, but this year we got a whopping 29 kids (well, 31 if you count my wacky 19 and 21-year-old sisters who showed up at the last minute, dressed like they were straight out of the 1980s, looking for leftover goodies...) But we had a good Halloween in general! Other than that, I've been keeping busy with school and work, and squeezing in a few custom bead orders and trying to get more new jewelry made as well. Right now, I'm hoping to clear out some older "sale" items via Ebay and make some room in my jewelry storage containers! Congratulations to Victoria B., who won my latest contest for free beads and jewelry! She selected the red/silver chandelier earrings as her prize, and now she just needs to get her ears pierced! Ha, ha, ha!! :) Also, I got a nice promotion at work last week, so I am definitely excited about that! I even got candy and flowers to go along with it! :) So that has definitely been a highlight of the past week. We also went crane-watching last weekend, which was really neat. Today I just ordered some Raku glass frit, which is tiny little multi-colored pieces of glass that I can roll my lampwork beads in to give them some really fun effects. I am looking forward to trying it! I also attempted to make a couple snowman beads last weekend. They didn't turn out quite as nice as I was hoping for, but I'll keep trying! I'm also working on raised florals, which was one of the main styles of beads that I *really* wanted to make when I first started lampworking. But I was never able to master them, so I gave up. Now I am trying again, so hopefully I'll be able to offer some raised florals for sale soon!