Some new resin pieces and one finished irregular right angle weave project

This week in my new town we had freezing fog for two days. It ended up 'flocking' everything. Coming from Seattle, I've never seen this before, and it was beautiful. As the fog lifted, you could finally see the mountains to the west. That's the continental divide we get to look at every day, and according to the weather guy, that cloud your seeing is an inversion over the Condon Valley (I'm in the Mission Valley). This is hot chocolate time at it's best.

Meanwhile, the buttons I ordered for 4 of the 5 irregular right angle weave projects I talked about last week, still aren't here. That's what I get for ordering from overseas. It's been 14 days as of today since I ordered these buttons. Hopefully I get to talk about them next week.

Fusionbeads.com's packaga did come this week (yay) which containt the 10mm Swarovski Ravoli button I ordered to complete this one. The come in 15 colors (at least at Fusion) and aren't an arm and a leg, if you're interested, click  here.


In resin world this week:

I mentioned a last week that I got this new baking mold to make rings out of. Here's one of the things I've come up with so far (and completed):

After curing an extremely thin ring of color, I had another mold of nearly the same outside diameter that I set the cured ring into. After pouring more resin in and allowing it to cure, you have a great frame. In the finished example on the bottom I have a squiggly line on the ring, plus a final coat of resin, I left it clear in the middle.

I'll talk more about my experiments with resin and alcohol inks, one of my favorite ways to add a transparent color, as well as glitter, one of my all time most favorite way ever of adding color to resin, in later blogs. In the meantime, here's a bit of what I made this week. These are all made with the new 2" round mold, they're all undrilled because I have yet to decide which will be buttons and which will be pendants (you're welcome to offer suggestions)

 

Next week:

 

The other four finished irregular right angle weave projects (hopefully)

 

More resin

 

Cleaning houses for rich folks (one of the things I do in my spare time)

 

 



Irregular Right Angle Weave & New Molds for Resin

This week was irregular right angle weave week. I ended up coming up with a few pieces, all of which are still unfinished, you'll see the finished products next week after the buttons I ordered for them arrive.

I'm having a lot of fun with this stitch. It makes this wavy line that I chose to highlight in center of these two pieces:

Then in these pieces, it's used as a seperater between rows of 3mm bicone crystals. The one on the left is using regular Japanese rocailles with Swarovski's Silver Night crystal, I need to order more of those before I can finish. The one on the right is using delicas. I didn't think I was going to like the look of the delicas at first, but once I got to the fifth row, it started to take shape and I really liked it:

I also tried one with just metal beads (my personal favorite), but it's not as pliable as i want it, nor are the 'waves' as pronounced. It could be that there's not as much space between the 'waves' as there are in the other examples, or it could be that i used exlusively metal. It's the bracelet in the top pic on the far left. I'll see if I revisit that later. In the meantime, I have one other variety of irregular right angle weave that I'm working on right now, it'll be mentioned in next week's blog.

In the resin world, I received a couple of new molds this week, one was meant to replace my larger button molds, but they ended up being slightly smaller. Bummer. The ones I have, Wilton Silicon Large Muffin Bakeware, are just about out of service. I've searched for the, but they seem to making them different now. So until I can find a mold that matched my larger round size, I might just have this new size, approx 2" instead of 2 1/8".

I also received a new 'donut' style mold. It's for some sort of cake like mold that you put sugary subsance on one half and sandwich it in with another half. I've got one of these new cavitites filled with resin, and four of the cavitites with just a ring around the outside. It's curing now, I'll have some finished examples next week.

I ordered resin over a week ago, fully expecting it to get here last week. It did. It got here on Saturday. Unfortunately (and yet fortunately) I'm on rural delivery and our contracted mail person will not or can not (I'm unsure of which one) deliver mail that is marked for delivery confirmation. I got the notice from my mail person at 2pm on Saturday, our post office closes at noon on Saturdays. Then Monday (today) is a holiday. I've exhausted every drop of resin in my house, I'm having slight withdrawals.

Next week:

My finished irregular right angle weave projects

Resin

My dilema of the molds

Whatever else floats my fancy

In the meantime, here's Joan. She's a nine year old Australian cattle dog. She's just about the best cuddler you could ever have.

This Blog is Heading in a New Direction

I originally started this blog last year with the intention of logging each yarn shop that has purchased my buttons. Things have changed.

I was getting up to two new shops in one day while road tripping down the west coast early last year. I started out being very diligent about updating my blog, but as time went on, that wasn't happening. I also started out taking very detailed notes AND keeping track of those notes about each shop, that also didn't last long.

I realized, although people tell me I'm organized, it obviously only looks that way. So, one of two things need to happen: I need to be more realistic in what I set out to achieve, or I need to be more disciplined.

Maybe I can be a little of both?

In the meantime: This blog will remain "I Push My Own Buttons" (because I still do), but will now be about one or more of the following, up to and including but not limited to:

1. trying to start my business www.mgloden.com
2. living in a small town
3. what I made last week
4. what I'm working on this week
5. how my pets (2 dogs, 1 cat and 1 husband) are doing
6. whatever floats my fancy

Basically, it's all about me, and beads, and resin and shiny things. I'll include pictures, too!

So to start off, here's a picture of what happened this week:

Snow!

This tree is right outside my kitchen window. Some sort of a willow tree, the type is still being debated by all my friends. I use this window and counter for all my pictures, I have no light box (yet), and I've found this is the best spot in the house. It's facing west, which normally I would use a southern facing window, but the three of ours have big fir trees blocking them.

And here it is, my west facing window. Today is obviously not picture day, today is find-all-the-papers-in-your-house-and-put-them-on-the-counter day.

I'm also working on a few right-angle-weave (RAW) projects this week. I love that stitch! I've been stitching with the RAW stitch since I first saw a David Chatt piece over 20 years ago. Since then, most of the beading projects I design are based on that stitch. I just ordered the finishing touches on these new designs, hopefully they will be here before next week's blog.

Next week:
The RAW projects
Some buttons I'm making
And whatever floats my fancy

Until then, here's one of my family memebers, Gabby. She's around 2 years old, is a talker, and she came with the house we rented. We found her in one of the back sheds, she has since adopted us, so she'll come with us when we move.

Happy Knits - Portland

Location:        Portland, Oregon

Shop:              Happy Knits

Owner/Buyer:  Sara/Tai

Website:         http://happyknits.com/

Happy Knits is definitely a happy place. One of Portlands newest yarn shops. They've only been open for just over two years and seem to be thriving. Not only is Happy Knits one of the newer shops, they're one of the bigger shops, plus you can shop online.

Happy Knits has one of the largest and more inviting common areas I've seen in a yarn shop. The table above is HUGE, plus there's a couch and a couple of chairs you can sit in while knitting in front of the gas fireplace. Everytime I've been in this shop, there's at least one person sitting and knitting away. There was even someone there when I took this picture, but she said it wasn't a good hair day for her, so asked me to keep her out of the picture, so she's off to the right.

Notions galore plus a few other things. A great place to buy your knitting friends a gift. Plenty of tote bags to put your craftiness in, plus plenty of other notions.

There's also plenty of inspiration throughout the store, not only in samples, but there's a section where the employees put their favorite patterns for the shoppers to look at. And a great range of experience within these patterns, plenty of simple things, but a few more difficult patterns for those that like to be challanged.




Next stop:  Seattle, Washington (my hometown)


It's been awhile since my last blog, I'll try not to do that anymore. My husband and I are just getting settled into our new state of Montana. I absolutely love it here, so do my dogs, I still have at least eight more shops to talk about before I get into rebuilding my studio and making buttons in Montana. Thanks for your patience in this time of transition.

Dancing Beads - Medford, Oregon

Location: Medford, Oregon
Shop:       Dancing Beads
Owner:    Carol
Website:  www.dancingbeads.com/

Medford has 70,000 folks and only one bead shop. Carol actually closed Dancing Beads a couple of years ago, thinking she was done with the bead store. She tried a couple of other things, including writing HTML and helping with web sites, but she soon found that she really enjoyed playing with her beads and cats more. Carol felt she needed to take her "office" out of her home environment which was too distracting (all those beads, and that cat), so she went searching for an office space. She found a spot in her neighborhood in a home that had been converted to retail/office space. As she was getting a feel for the place, she says a voice popped into her head 'This is going to be my new beadshop', and she answered back 'that's funny, I didn't know I was going to open another bead shop'.

She still had a lot of stock from the store she had closed a couple years back, so she opened up another bead shop. She had a lot of her old customers come back relieved that she decided to do it again, and she's gained new customers as well.

They've got a great selection of classes, and the class size is usually limited to six people, which makes it easy to get some one-on-one with the instructor. I was impressed that for a small(ish) bead shop, they've found some great ways of displaying a lot of merchandise.

Medford is located just north of California on I-5, worth a layover if you're passing through.

Next stop: Portland, Oregon.

Middleford Yarn & Stitchery - Medford, Oregon

Location: Medford, Oregon
Shop:       Middleford Yarn & Stitchery Shoppe
Owner:    Sonja
Website: www.miyarn.com/

Medford is in southern Oregon just north of Ashland on I-5. 70,000 people live in this sunny valley. It's location between two mountain ranges, the Siskiyous and the Cascades, allows the rain that permeates the pacific northwest to bypass Medford. On average, they get 180 more days of sun  than Seattle. That's half a year. Kinda depressing when you think about it.

Sonja has a lot of things on her plate. She does custom upholstery, runs a furniture shop, has the yarn shop (which includes counted cross-stitch), plus she offers individual lessons, and all under one roof.

She's been doing upholstery for 20 years in Medford, the yarn shop came 10 years later. She says she's addicted to both hobbies. She even makes most of the samples adorning the furniture in the show room, like the bed in the middle above.

Another store with lots of inspiring samples. According to Sonja, the key to having your store samples not take over your back room is to make only things she likes and that fit her. That's smart, I think.

Her shop has a 'Stitch-In' on Thursday nights, a 'Help Time' on Wednesdays as well as the weekends as long as they're not too busy, plus they have 'Social Stitch' all day on the weekends. That's the knitting schedule, there's also things happening for the cross-stitchers, check the website if you're interested.