Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Catching Up

I have to admit, I always find it a little funny. Both times I've come out to Seattle, weather.com always predicts horrible stormy, rainy and unseasonably cold weather for almost the whole duration. So far, I've gotten 3 sunny days weather.com never predicted, it's reasonably moderate, and the two rainy days were only half-rainy, really - sun's trying to come out right now!

So, today, I've been playing catch-up, with my custom orders and really sitting down and working away at my vials. (Yesterday was playing kitchen mad-scientist with from scratch butterscotch pudding and a mushroom risotto.)

The plants and flowers here area alway so fascinating, though also a bit frustrating, because I don't recognize so many of them, and it can sometimes be a pain to identify them. And, of course, I have to know what they are, before I can put them in any of my vials. I'm not sure how I'm going to use it yet, but the flowers of the Andromeda bush seem perfect for my media!

My current small hangup is finding a decent gem shop while I'm here. I brought a great stash with me, but I just lost my last piece of blue-green (striped) tourmaline, and I've got a request for that as an ingredient.

Finding good quality, raw, untreated gemstones is a bit of an issue; but a quality point I don't mind being a stickler about. But, I haven't called around a town only to get confused and unhelpful answers to this extent since that time I called all the music shops in Nashville looking for accordion repair.

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With that in mind, I went to go see what other sellers on Etsy make the point to use rocks in the raw.

There were a few jewelry makers working with raw stones; but nothing came up as wholly raw as Bela Brazilian Designs and this necklace she calls "Rock Candy."

Rather unrelated, but also quite fascinating, she has a large variety of jewelry made from poly-resin preserved orchids and butterflies. Really makes the mind boggle. Overall, a beautiful shop with a nice selection of natural beauty tweaked into jewelry.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Its cool you sneak in an etsy seller. I do on my blog too.

http://apps.jilwright.com/blog
http://sunraven0.etsy.com

FairiesNest said...

New town, new supplies, sounds like quite an experience! I've found myself going to Etsy suppliers several times recently, wonderful experiences so far...