Jewellery By Shalini

Beadsoup Blog Party Reveal Date has been postponed by one week to 10 May . Our hostess Lori has been very unwell and its more important that she gets herself better first! Not the kind of photos you normally expect to see shared on this blog but this is what I have been  working with since November instead of pliers, beads, wire and gemstones... Personally this postponement suits me. As you know I have not been able to work for almost 3 months due to the stupid Iritis! There have been several ups and downs on that saga since I last blogged about it including a visit to A&E due to acute eye pain and very high eye pressure! The good news is that the Iritis inflammation has finally gone and eye pressure is back to normal. The bad news is that the medication has to continue until 13 May so vision will stay slightly blurred until then. But I was able to get back to doing some work. Nothing fancy, just basic wire work and some fights with cords and ribbons. Susan a...

... well as normal as it can possibly be with 3 lots of steroid eye drops, plus a gooey ointment in both eyes daily and some of the blurriness that is a result of it... This picture is a fair indication of what my vision has been like at times in recent weeks!  Had a little tidy-up of the work bench over the week-end and I made some beads for my beadsoup partner yesterday. Hopefully they will be dry today and then I can match up a few more ingredients and get this in the post this week to Ottawa, Canada where my new BSBP partner Susan lives. The Focal piece and matching beads were ready a while ago but I decided to add something different to the mix too. And NO I am not telling you what beads I made just yet! :-P More about Susan in the next blog post... And I have started playing with some beautiful beach glass a client gave me sometime ago. + The new lot of St Helena Rock + A Wire and Felt Peacock project I am working on with my friend Eve. + Don't get me starte...

So the 8th Beadsoup Blog Party International Partners have been announced. Our hostess is US based so I am "international" from her location :-) In the next few days I am hoping to get to know my partner. Meanwhile a disaster (for me it is!). Iritis is back and this time it is in BOTH Eyes. Bugger! This is not good as I only got the all clear on 11th Feb! I feel really down and defeated at the moment because I am letting my clients down and I am letting my businesses down. I am writing this post through a haze... or better description is probably looking through a waterfall. I can barely make out what I am typing even through the browser is set to 250%. And in a few minutes I have to use the dilating eye drops again and then even this will not be possible! I am not asking anyone to feel sorry for me (I can do a very good job of doing that all by myself!) but it does mean all these fancy plans of learning new skills and trying new ideas that I have talked about in the pa...

...sometimes don't quite materialise. Oh well... That's life. Its my Birthday week-end so Dave & I had planned two days of intense learning to celebrate... how to solder, how to set bezels, how to make cold connections... and create a few new pieces in time for 3 Christmas shows coming up. Unfortunately an old friend decided to pay a visit on my birthday (yesterday). Well not quite a friend, I don't like it, I don't want it, but it likes to arrive unannounced anyway and linger for a while. And it has no concept of timing! (Grrrrrrr!) So here I am suffering with an Iritis flare up (right eye pain, light sensitivity, blurred vision in the affected eye due to the medication, more eye pain) Intricate jewellery work is out. Spending too much time at the computer is out. Daytime telly is not really my thing and its not a good idea to watch TV with an aching eye anyway. Its been just over 24 hours and I am bored already! So the next few days I will probably spend ti...