Heart Like a...??

Hi, there. Happy Monday, everyone. Here's a new necklace I designed with a teenager in mind. What do you think? Is it hip enough for a teen to wear? The kind of teen who has a lot of black in her (or even his, although the heart in the pendant could be an issue, I suppose) wardrobe? The cube beads are lava. I understand from the beading magazines that this is a fairly hot material (no pun intended), but I'd never actually seen a strand in person - I ended up ordering these from Fire Mountain Gems. I love it - the lava is pitted, is terribly tactile, has a lot of character and isn't terribly "girly".

Speaking of the 'zines, I've had the two earring designs I raced around to put together last week, as well as a necklace incorporating one of my koi pendants, accepted for publication next year. The earrings will be published next February and the necklace is slated for next April. I felt awful after staying up until all hours putting those projects together at the last minute, but in the end I'm glad I made the effort to meet the deadline. Every time I pull a late night like that, I swear up and down that it will be the last time. I guess I'm just a born procrastinator. And you already know what a short memory I have. Sigh.

The Short One and I have been playing charades a lot, lately. The SO has been practicing his words and letters pretty much non-stop. He's recently undergone a surge of new ones, and I'm having a hard time keeping up and keeping them sorted. This morning, I could have sworn he told me he wanted some "juice", when he was really commenting on having "two" boats. I thought he was "yowling" like a cat, when in fact he was commenting that his toy piano has a "yellow" musical note painted on the side. Needless to say, it has all been very frustrating for the SO that Mama can't seem to keep up. While part of me knows that, if I weren't his Mama, I'd probably be understanding less than 2% of what he says, another part of me thinks that the old adage that mothers always know what their babies are saying is a bunch of hooey. The SO's pronunciation and diction improve daily, but at the moment, it's kind of like hosting a little foreign exchange student with extremely high standards of cuisine.

Hope all is well where you are. Thanks for stopping by.