Have I mentioned the gem show lately?

I know, I know, it's nothing but gem show around here from mid-January to mid-February! I just love it so much! The first long-running shows are opening up along the I-10 this week, so I'm very excited to take my brother-in-law to them on Saturday. He's never had the Tucson Gem Show Experience. I hope he's up for it!

Wings of the Morrigan is just not shaping up. I've ripped out about as many beads as I've stitched down! I probably won't finish it in time for gem show, but it's not as if I don't have plenty of old jewelry to wear... and while I may not have a new necklace for the Swarovski party, I will have new moves on the dance floor.

So much for beading.

Argh, I swear, these bezels are out to get me. This one should fit the rivoli I made it for, and it's just not fitting. So once again, I'll have to start over. Eventually I'm probably going to get annoyed and stop working with rivolis altogether.

I spent today cleaning up my bead room, sorting through the piles of beads on my desk in there. I'm making some progress, and really instilling in myself a desire to be better about putting beads away as soon as I'm done with a project. I might even finish cleaning the desk off tomorrow.

Photography didn't happen today, I was just too busy and too tired. Maybe tomorrow.

The beads aren't playing nice!

Last night I sat down to work on Locked Away some more. Well, after how perfectly the first side came together, with such graceful curves for the wing... the second side had to be all "Blargh! I am ugly!" The beads just refused to stitch down nicely, and I kept having to remove them and do it over, and then it would look even worse. In an amount of time that I expected to do 1 1/2-2 rows, I got less than one done, and half of that will have to be ripped out again.

So today I decided that I was about due for a break from Locked Away. After all, I haven't beaded anything else since I started it (other than that 1-hour pendant), and my website was suffering from the lack of new jewelry. Plus I had a nice idea for a rivoli pendant that I could put on a strung necklace. And you know what? The colors that I picked look absolutely gorgeous together. Too bad the bezel is too small.

Someday I'll learn to keep double-checking the bezel size as I work!

I think that tomorrow I'll be able to get the bezel right, but now I'm just feeling frazzled.