*My 30 below beads* *After the snowshoeing*

So It’s 35 below zero in town today and a balmy 22 below up in the hills here. It’s kind of like Christmas vacation has already begun. My honey and I don’t have to go to work in the winter since he’s semi retired and I’m a seasonal landscape/groundskeeper. This gives me time to work on the bead and jewelry biz and for us to travel.

We’re hunkering down somewhat but still making trips to town to go to yoga or an appointment here and there. I am choosing to stay home as much as possible. My 24 year old son is back in town from being gone 7 years. He hasn’t experienced an Interior winter in that long and yearned for that extreme again after years in the Southwest. He had a day off yesterday from his construction job (They were still working outside) but when the temperature dipped they called it off. He’s been wanting to get into the studio and try his hand at bead making. He had a short stint helping out a well known glassworker in Santa Fe and seems to have more of a knack for it than when I first started 9 or ten years ago.

I’m hoping that I can get him into some production work for me and get him to make some twisty canes for me which I haven’t put the time into mastering yet. He said that his teacher told him he had a knack for that as well. I’ve been able to walk away from the studio and let him play. Of course he is learning from mistakes the hard way such as letting the beads touch in the kiln and messing up two of his first best beads.

I’m taking some time to play as well with all of my new colors from Frantz Art Glass such as messy Pumpkin, Celadon, Red Roof Tile, Copper red, Copper green and my favorite old standby now Iris Orange Frit otherwise known as Raku Frit. I have been faithful to my Zoozii’s presses too especially the small lentil trio, Nugget trio and large lentil and large Kalera. I’ve been wrapping presents too. I took my scrap rods and used my nippers to make small bits of cane to stack on Morretti sheet glass and went to a fellow fuser friend’s studio to make some random ornaments. It is the first time I’ve fused glass and it was really fun. I can use my own kiln but I need to learn to reprogram my digital controller for another phase for fusing. How hard can it be? Is it confusing? ( ooh that’s bad!)

So we’ve been watching episodes of Six Feet Under since 8:00AM, staving off a wicked sinus headache from extremely dry air and putting logs on the fire like crazy. Lucky we’ve got a huge stack of firewood outside.

I’ve made a few sales with etsy, even an international one so I’m excited.I keep posting more each day hoping to get noticed. It’s kind of fun but a pulls me in a little much at times. Pot’s of beans and Moose stew on the stove and a boatload of Christmas candy that I made . I wanted to make a marshmallow caramel combo candy from scratch.. I didn’t realize how easy marshmallows are to make. Just hard to scrape from the bowl like white oobleck. I found a couple of recipes online and much to my surprise my copy of ReadyMade magazine showed up the very next day with a recipe for homemade marshmallows and Caramel. Am I in the zone or what?!

We went snowshoeing the other day before it got too cold. It was getting a little nippy for cross country skiing but it’s a pleasure to strap on the snowshoes and walk right across the road through the woods following rabbit and moose trails up to the pipeline corridor. The spruce trees were laden with frost and snow looking like Dr. Seuss trees lining the trail. It ’s so magic with the clear skies and frost and the crunching of snow.

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