i heart discoveries

Pure pleasure is when an oh-oh turns into an a-ha. It is how some of our greatest inventions came to be.

I use a lot of glass beads to make my bamboo tiles bracelets and I buy bead mixes a lot of times because they have colors that cannot be purchased by themselves. Also, they are much cheaper, if you don't factor in the time it takes to sort them into individual colors. Sorting beads is laborious, but kind of zen because it requires absolutely no thought, so I can zone out into my kaleidoscope of a subconscious. Until I get bored, then it's a big PITA again. And sometimes you spill an entire cup of beads that you just sorted, right onto the carpet. Ugh! Or maybe not...when I picked the beads up off the carpet I noticed now much easier it was than when I picked through them on a plastic tray. Off the carpet I could use my fingers, not the tweezers and pliers that I normally use.

No, I did not dump all my beads on the ground. I got out a large tray and covered it with a towel, then I just spread my bead mix out and went to town.

My life just got a lot easier.

Support Your Local Library..

I've always been "artsy", even when I was a kid but I never took it seriously. I'd always been under the impression that arts & crafts were hobbies and not a sensible way to support a family. So when I grew up I got a real job and made crafts in my spare time, when there was any. This mostly meant making Christmas decorations with the kids, maybe some handmade gifts and of course, school art projects. Over the years I've dabbled in cross stitch, beads and sequins, papier mache, decoupage, tole painting, plaster figurine painting and even went through a body art phase with the whole tattoo rig. I learned about most of these genres by purchasing a craft kit at Michael's, before that it was Lee Wards or Moskatels. I've been around a while. But my art, and actually my whole life, changed when I re-discovered the wonder that is my local Public Library.

I am a life long artist and also an avid reader of non-fiction. I thrive on learning and knowing new things. I was an Internet enthusiast since the early days of dial up when it was mostly 'bulletin boards'. Anybody remember those? If so, you must be old like me. The webs have come a long way since then, but even at the time I was ecstatic over the prospect of instant information. I still love the Internet and spend way too much time exploring it, but in my opinion, nothing beats a good book.

Back in '98, my husband and I bought our first house. The kids were in a new school and right down the street was the public library. My husband and kids are avid readers too and we were all excited to have a library so close, but our first visit left us a little disappointed. The branch was tiny compared to the giant library in our community's downtown area. What to do? Our local branch was too small, but the big library was too inconvenient. I mentioned this to the librarian and what she told me rocked my world. She said that it was easy to get any book in the system delivered right to my neighborhood branch free of charge. I could go online and request any book, CD or video in the county library's vast holdings and when it arrived they would notify me to come pick it up.

This literally changed my life. Thanks to the public library system, I have acquired knowledge and skills that have made it possible for me to confidently plan family trips to the Grand Canyon, Washington, D.C., London, and Paris. I've learned about organic gardening, homesteading and raising backyard chickens. I've checked out books to learn new computer programs, how to work from home and how to write a resume'. By far, the majority of the books I check out are books on art & crafts. I have learned dozens of new crafting skills. Sewing, resin casting, altered art, wire jewelry, soldering, bead stringing and much much more.

And it's all thanks to my local library.

Bamboo Tile Bracelets

When I was a kid, my mom turned me onto collage using the cards I received for my birthday. It's still one of my favorite ways to express myself artistically. When I was a teen, I was a smoker and so were most of the people I hung out with. Everybody had disposable lighters and everyone borrowed each others and you could never be sure who they belonged to. I began to decorate my lighter with stickers and such as a way to identify it, but really because lighters are just too darn plain and they need to be fancied up in my opinion. Some of my friends started to put stickers on their lighters too, but with much less artistic flair. I was creating tiny collages. Stickers gave way to cut out pictures from rock magazines like Creem and Hit Parader and such. I loved giving them as gifts and I still do, even though I no longer smoke.

'Wizard of Oz' bracelet made for my Dorothy loving niece.

One day whilst surfing the web, I came across a tutorial for a bracelet made from bamboo tiles. The artist was a scrapbooker who had stamped some fancy designs on the tiles and strung them together into a stretchy cuff bracelet. Scrapbooking is one of the few genres that I have not really gotten into, and so I didn't have any cool stamps, but I did have a ton of paper scraps I'd been saving for collages. "It's just like my lighter collages from the 80s", I thought. Voila', a new obsession was born. I have since purchased a few snazzy stamps and a whole bunch of letter stamps, so now I can create bamboo tiles bracelets to suit most any style. See more bracelets here.

"Fleur de Lys" stamped & embossed design

Welcome to my blog...

It's me, Red Scorpio, humble artistan and arbitrary crafter. My life was turned upside down in 2009 when the company where I had worked for over 20 years abruptly shut down, and it's been pretty surreal ever since. On this blog I will be sharing some of the experiences I have gone through and continue to face on my journey to create a new and better life for myself and my family. I hope you will become a regular visitor.  And if you are a fan of handmade goods, please visit my Etsy shop.