The Year in Pictures

January First.  Beginning of a New Year. 

And you know what?  I GOT this.  I am all over it. 

2011 was crazy and scary and amazing.  I worked my ass off, and I feel like I am finally moving in the right direction.  Yay!

I took the last few days off to work on some personal projects that I just haven't had time for with everything else going on.  I spent hours this past week going through all the photos I have taken this year, editing and cropping, and just loving reliving all those moments.  Now, I am my mother's daughter, so I pretty much always have a camera glued to my hand.  And I'm a sucker for sunsets and oceans and clouds.   But I'll try not to get tooo carried away.....

January:  I sent in my portfolio for my graduate school application.

Then Mark and I moved to Richmond.  This is the first day of setting up the new studio! 



February: Buster came into our lives and we all enjoyed exploring Richmond together.

March : I revamped the look of my jewelry business, CopperTide.

April: Worked on tool designs and Micro Raising Workshop development with NC Black Co.

May: Chuck and I taught our first Micro Raising Workshop

at Sawtooth School for Visual Art in Winston-Salem, NC.

Then I went to the SNAG conference in Seattle and worked the 

NC Black vendor booth with Andrea and Les.

June:  I launched my new Reef Jewelry line.

July : Traveled to Colorado with NC Black to do a vendor booth at the CoMA Conference.

August : My first outdoor "craft show," the Watermelon Festival in Carytown.



Then took a little time off for the beach, and got to see a hurricane pass by the SC coast.  Amazing.

September : Mark and I launched our new business, CopperDog Studio.

October: Taught my first enameling workshop at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.

November : Started teaching an evening course at The Visual Arts Center, then got some more beach time for Thanksgiving.



December : Made lots of jewelry, dog tags, and festive confectionery delights!

So here's to 2011!  It was a hell of a year! 

2012 : BRING.IT.ON.



Seattle, Just for Fun

I'm always inspired by shapes and colors and things I see around me, so when I'm in a new or interesting place, I generally have my camera in tow.  Now that I've finally gotten most of the business stuff from the SNAG Conference out of the way, I just wanted to post a few fun photos that I took while I was in Seattle.

Seattle in a very cool city with a lot of great things to look at.  I did spend a lot of time at the conference, but I stayed at the home of my friends Ben and Annie (Annie, unfortunately, was out of town that weekend.)  But Ben took me around and showed me some great Seattle sites I might not have seen otherwise.  Thanks, dude!

Here are a few from Pike Place Market (the market of fish-tossing fame).  I was digging the colors inside:

 

This was in a neat artsy section of town called Ballard:

Love the troll under the bridge!  That is a real VW Bug he's crushing.

This was a lovely rocky beach called Golden Gardens Beach right on the Puget Sound:



And of course, I had to get in a couple Space Needle shots:

All in all, a pretty fine trip!  It's great to be around so many talented people in such a beautiful, inspiring city!