Monday, April 22, 2013

Back To Normality...

The crazy Easter Holiday is over, back from Istanbul, Brighton and the Bowie exhibition at the V&A - quite wonderful, well worth seeing if you are a Bowie fan, probably best avoided if you are not - and back into the workshop. I've been there for a week now, but it has been so hectic that it feels like I've never been away.

My first morning back, I had agreed to help the Physical Education department to train their new personal trainers, so I was sweating buckets on a rowing-machine for the first hour of the day. Oddly enough, it put me in a really good mood for the rest of the day, however. Despite the trainee trainer telling me that I had dreadful posture and poor breathing (in far kinder and more polite terms, of course). The good thing about that is that we have been working on that for a couple of subsequent sessions and I realise that I do have terrible posture. Not helped last Saturday by spending a couple of hours picking up rusty nails on a derelict rail-yard in glasgow...

It was good to take stock of everything that had happened over the previous two weeks and to look over my Istanbul treasures, fantastic bits of metal, a huge chunk of chain from the loom we found, and lots and lots of books and gemstones.

Istanbul Treasures - Included Quartzes - 16

Included quartzes galore...

Istanbul Treasures - Included Quartzes - 15

Aquamarines as big as boiled sweets...

Istanbul Treasures - Aquamarine - 7

Phenomenal tourmalines...

Istanbul Treasures - Tourmalines - 4

Gifts of rusty metal and glass beads...

Istanbul Treasures - 2

And some beautiful enamelled watch parts from Umut:

Istanbul Treasures - Watch Case - 25

Now I have to think about using them!



I've also been catching up on commissions, largely smaller stuff which came on the back of the show, earrings, and rings and a re-make of my "File Pendant" which I made last year. I really like the new one better than the original.

New File Pendant - 1

More later in the week!