I Got A Magazine In The Mail!

I have six Art Jewelry Magazines that I treasure. Someone, who will always have a special space in my heart, forever and ever, just as soon as I remember who-- gave me a one year gift subscription. Not only was this a thoughtful and much loved gift, it was also an expensive one. It is a bi-monthly magazine. And not the good bi-monthly were it's almost every two weeks but not quite. The cheap-ass bi-monthly where you only get six magazines a year. Which, when the time came around, cost 35 bucks to renew. Even still, if I had had the 35 bucks to spare at the time, I would have re-upped.

So time kept slipping, slipping, slipping into the future and all of a suddenly it's last October about Halloween time. I get one of them discount magazine whoziwhatzits that clearinghouses send out. There I find Step By Step Wire Jewelry. It looks sort of like Art Jewelry but without the feature articles, just the tutorials. And this is only 17 dollars for a year! I snap it up (just in case you're confused-- buying the magazine from the site will cost you a bit more). I subscribe.

Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hubby's birthday, New Years all come in a bunch and distract me. Hey, I can barely keep track of my day to day existence, much less remember when I spend 17 dollars impulsively. Until 4 days ago when I got my first magazine. That not-the-good-kind of bi-monthly makes for a huge lag in between issues. Especially if there's not an issue to lag from. If you know what I mean.

It is, in fact, a magazine of tutorials. One of the tuts was a pair of pretty stud-like earrings. The only problem was that the tut involved a torch. My son once tried to give me a lesson in soldering. When I was done I had a closed ring with a blobby mess where the space used to be. "See," says my son, "easy!"

"That'll probably work fine on a circuit board but nobody's gonna wear it as a ring," I respond. I'm not gonna use a torch in bed anyway. But I still wanna make the earrings. So I improvise and these are the results:

By the way, Step by Step has a website, Jewelry Making Daily, that has free projects for download. You do not have to subscribe to the mag to get them but you do have to register. And they're free! Exactly the right price.



And, in closing, look at this pretty picture I took:

P.S., my Artfire and Etsy. Buy something.