Way back in the spring, Rachel Place and I, having recently met on-line through Art Bead Scene, agreed that we would have a holiday gift exchange. Rachel was already a very talented lampwork artist, but I had only a few months of lampworking experience, and I'm not even sure I'd even started working with PMC at that point. So, I looked on the future exchange as a goal - to have something worthy to send by the end of the year. As usual, the year is winding up unexpectedly fast, and we've both ended up embarking on new ventures over the past few months, so the prospect of the exchange was actually pretty exciting.
I received these lovely little packages in the mail today. (Even the box was super-cute, with big polka dots and cupcake stickers.) If you look closely, you'll see that the wrapping paper is totally kawaii, which, as you know, I love. Fortunately, the packages opened like little envelopes, and I was able to preserve the paper - I'm hoping I can do something with it in the future. (By the way, background art in this photo is once again courtesy of the Short One.)
Are these not to die for?!? Cakes and skulls, my favorites!!! In the center, my favorite cupcake design, called "Grinchy", with a red-and-white candy-striped base and green icing. To the right of that an amazing little cake bead with beautifully detailed "icing". As if that weren't enough, she completely surprised me with two of her gorgeous lampworked beads (look closely at the stacked dots on the one bead) a sugar skull bead (which is a "Can This Bead Be Saved" project - it is cracked, but I'm almost positive I can use it with a little epoxy and a lot of resin), and one of her cute pocket mirrors with a photo of my favorite Sugar Topper Skull on chocolate cupcake. For more information on Sugar Toppers and Rachel's cake beads, please visit her blog and her Etsy store.
Needless to say, I feel that I made out like a bandit in this exchange, and I loooovvvee my new beads. I'm sure you'll be seeing them in new projects on this blog very soon. (I do feel completely inadequate in that I only sent her one measly pendant in exchange, in an unwrapped box in a plain padded envelope. Rachel, mea culpa - I am unworthy. I'll do better in the future, I promise.)
On other fronts, the slew of Christmas cards that we received in the mail suggested to us that we'd better photograph the Short One for our own cards sooner rather than later. (I make our Christmas cards with the computer, so it's not as if we have to send the photo out anywhere for processing.) I have a cute jester's hat I knit for the SO last spring that still fits, and we thought it was sufficiently elf-like to serve the purpose for our cards this year. Although it seemed like a good idea at the time, the Husband and I spent the better part of half an hour this evening chasing the SO around the living room with a camera, trying to keep him in frame long enough for a photo. We've ended up with about 40 very blurry images of the SO in various stages of yanking said hat off of his head and maybe 20 images of a random hand or foot that we barely managed to get in frame. I have a feeling that I'm going to be digging our boxed cards out of the basement instead, this year...
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