February was a horrible month this year. I spent half of it sick, with two separate colds; one to start the month and one to end it. I am just now getting over the second one. I spent 2 of the last 5 weeks sick and 2 weeks out of town. That left me with a little over one week to do anything. I spent most of it cleaning, some beading and spent a lot of my time while ill drinking hot tea and catching up on my reading.
I am now sort of back in the swing of things creatively and have been working on Khamse’en again. It’s been so long since I posted about her, I can’t remember what pictures I have posted. I’ve been working on her belt and on her skirt. I have also been cleaning out parts of my house. I procured another book case from Ikea and put it together today. Mars and Venus and Mercadriel are perched on top right now.
Draconis II traveled to Denver with me, and is, by now, home in Mountainair with the Gypsy. He survived his plane trip and met Ms. Pamela, who proclaimed he must be displayed in the booth for the Denver Sew Expo. I made some minor edits to the pattern that evening, thanks to an email from Mary Anne and brought them to the show the next morning. I priced them for the Gypsy and she put a few of them out.
I worked the show Thursday with Connie and Annie, who was developing a cold, and again on Friday with Connie. Annie stayed home in bed with her cold – which I apparently caught, as I’m suffering from cold-like symptoms today.
I was very excited to find out that 5 copies of the Draconis pattern sold during the show. I am going to file for copyright of the pattern, and soon after, it will be available for sale on my Etsy Shop.
Saturday, Connie and I spent the day wandering bead and yarn shops in Denver. Once I feel a bit better, I’ll post links to the stores I visited. They were just fabulous. We visited 3 bead shops and I loved each of them for different reasons. Saturday evening, we ate Italian with Annie at Patsy’s – which was fantastic food.
Sunday it started snowing, and I got on a plane to come home – minus the dragon and all of the patterns.
I have updated my website. Draconis disappeared after my last update. He’s now back, and Mercadriel has been added. I will add Draconis II after I’ve had a chance to edit the background out of all of the pictures. I also listed Mercadriel on Etsy – so if you want to own one of my dragons, head on over and check him out. I plan to make one more this year, which will also go up for sale on Etsy – to make a nice round number of 5 in my limited edition of Draconis-lineage dragons, only two of which will be available for purchase.
Tomorrow, assuming I feel better, I’m going to get back to beading on Khamse’en’s belt. I acquired the beads to finish off the rest of her clothes. I still have to figure out what to do with her hands – perhaps I’ll make her a flail, similar to those seen on mummies of Egyptian royalty.
It has been a rough week, but I made it to the weekend and have finished Draconis II and Mercadriel today. I finished beading Draconis middle of the afternoon and made the changes to his pattern. I then finished up Mercadriel’s wings and started taking pictures. I have to make a run to Office Depot to run off more copies of the pattern tomorrow and get another black toner cartridge for the printer. Enough words already! Here are the pictures. If you click on these pictures, several of them are larger format than I normally put on this blog – the better to see the beading!
I’ll post pictures of Mercadriel tomorrow and will let you now when the pattern will be available on Etsy.
The head and tail are beaded and the wings are in progress. The beading is going much slower than I would have liked, especially as I hoped to finish this guy up this weekend. Oh well, that’s a distant memory now. I started at 10am, took two meal breaks and a grocery store break, and am now stopping as I am so tired I figure I will dump my beads again. Luckily, the first time I did it, it was a small container of very large beads and I didn’t lose the whole container.
I spent most of the week in Washington, DC, for work and work I did. We went out for dinner on Tuesday night and then for a walk around the White House. The weather was nice, 55 degrees during the day, in the 40’s at night, so our walk was quite pleasant. The last time (and only other time) I was in DC, I spent a lot of time on the Mall, but didn’t ever make it to the White House. We saw the Eisenhower Building and the Treasury Building and all of the Banks surrounding the Treasury. And Americans wonder why Wall Street has such access to the Dept of the Treasury. All you have to do is walk across the street and you are at B of A.
Today was spent on cleaning and laundry. In between mopping the floor and pulling up landscape timbers from my front flower beds, I started stitching the Dragon’s wings. I finished that off this evening and started beading his head. I made good progress there, just having the eyebrow ridges to complete tomorrow. I need to bead the tail and the wings tomorrow as well.
Speaking of Dragons – head over to Mary Anne’s blog to see how her dragon is coming. She is pattern testing for me and has chosen fabulous fabric. I’m excited to see the progress she has made this week!
