What on Earth??

Or should I say: "What in Earth?"

Image is from the US Geological Survey agency.

Earthquakes in the Dallas area. Eight of them! The biggest was a puny 3.0 so on the scale, it's barely a blip ... although a lot of folks in the areas around the airport felt them and were talking about them. I live in Plano, too far away, so my world didn't seem to move at all. Unlike the years I lived in southern California. During those years, my world moved a lot. In fact, it was two back-to-back earthquakes in 1992 ... Landers and Big Bear ... that made us decide to pack up and get out of there. (To be honest, the earthquakes wouldn't have been nearly enough to cause us to make a huge changed in the lives of our boys, but these earthquakes followed on the heels of the Rodney King verdict riots.)

There's not a whole lot of information regarding intercontinental earthquakes, except for those occurring in the large river valleys ... Mississippi, Ohio, Wabash, etc ... so I can't find any answers as to what, exactly, caused the rumbling in our Mid-Cities area. But it is certainly weird. And eight of them ... not aftershocks, 8 individual quakes. So I'm really, really curious to know what is going on under our feet!

HOUSEKEEPING
I've received some tags and awards so I'd like to extend my gratitude to my blogging friends. The award was the one bestowed on me earlier, but I want to thank the two lovely ladies who though enough of me to nominate me again:

Leet: She's a wonderful artist. Really! To prove it, check out her gallery. This is one of my favorite blogs, I make sure to check in every time I sit to blog surf.

Cheryl: I love her blog ... it's all about card making and scrapbooking utilizing Stampin' Up, The Angel Company and Studio G products. Card making is one of my hobbies, and in fact, I use some of the items in my business such as packaging and thank you cards. I enjoy seeing the work of others, and Cheryl's work is beautiful. This is another favorite blog of mine I check on every time I surf.

I've been tagged twice:
Glitzy Gallery Gals and Silver Canyons... both fellow Etsians who make lovely handcrafted jewelry. I always feel honored to promote other jewelry artists. While it may seem to the rest of the world that we are competitors, and I suppose we really are when you look at it from a purely business standpoint, the fact is that we are first and foremost artists. Our styles are unique and there's a huge world out there with billions of differences in regards to taste and preference. It's a big enough world for all of us!

The tag is to list 7 little known facts about myself ... but that would kill off 7 future blog posts! But the first fact can be discerned from the beginning of this post. I am an armchair scientist (and I believe there is a Creator). And geology is one of my favorite subjects which explains my love affair with rocks. Being fascinated by earthquakes and volcanoes is just an extension on the scale of macro.

Skwiggazine Featured Artist
It's Sunday! My time for participation in this wonderful blog love exchange. This week we're focusing on Michelle Harvey of Michabella Creations. Be sure to check out her "Shop for a Cure" post. While October is over, cancer of all sorts is something which we should all be consistently aware.

I hope every single one of my readers has a fabulous time this upcoming week!

Making Product Labels

This was a great idea I found somewhere along my travels on the big WorldWide Web. I'm on a serious shoe-string budget and cannot afford professionally printed labels. But I wanted something other than the teeny-tiny threaded labels available at both hobby shops and office supply depots.

I took my business card, shrunk it to 1/4 of it's size and made a new "business card" with my logo/info repeated 4 times. Print out the new card, cut, punch and thread with either pearl cotton or fancy metallic thread and voila! It's a bit laborious, but it can be done whilst watching a movie or favorite TV show.

The back is blank leaving room for price and product information.

I'll be showing today at an open house hosted by a lovely lady I met through one of my local networks. If you're an artist seeking new opportunities to market your wares, joining local networks is a great way to meet new people and find new outlets. A good place to start in finding network groups in your area is here at Meetup.com

Tulip's Cooking

Time for a new Skwiggzine Blogger's spotlight. I had to jump on this right away because this post has made me soooooooooooo hungry!!

Tulip's Talking.

Dinner at Tulip's house tonight! Yeah!! I can beat the Texas heat. Doesn't the final product look totally scrumptious?

Networking

For the past several months, I've been engaged in exploring the various network marketing groups in my area. Because I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area, I have a number of groups from which to choose. Because I am a jewelry designer, I focused on those that cater to women. Most I have found in a nice little site called MeetUp.

I have expanded my business horizons since joining various groups. Some have worked very well for me, some have not. But even those that haven't worked out for me because of various reasons still helped me grow as a business woman. I have met a large variety of women engaged in a wide variety of businesses, some of which offer services that I can benefit from.

The starring jewel of my finds has been Sharon Schierling, a life/business coach who is smart and wise and caring and giving. She offers a variety of services and I highly recommend her to anyone in need of a different perspective on life and/or work. In addition to being a certified life coach, she also has an MBA and a lot of experience both in the corporate world and as an entrepreneur. Visit her website, Refined Perspectives to learn more about her. And by exploring her site, you'll learn more about yourself.

While on the idea of refined, and to post the obligatory picture, here's a piece I designed a while ago that is one of my favorites and it's still in my case:



The pale pastel mother of pearl coin beads are joined to gold mobius knots made from 14k gold-fill rings I made myself. It's available on
Etsy.

Thank goodness for Skwiggazine!

Say what? Go here: Skwiggazine. Cool place and I belong to a group within this network for bloggers. At the moment, it's the one thing that keeps me showing up here. I know, that's bad, but we all know how many hours there are in each day and we probably all feel there just isn't enough. But eventually, things get done ... we hope.

As part of this blogging group, we all visit each other's blogs and each week we post a link and a comment to the featured blog of the week. I missed last week (I'm hanging my head in shame) but I'll make it up to Stacy next time. This week is another Stacy, and ... well ... you all know the power of pictures. Get ready and say ahhhhhh!

And kudos to Stacy for being environmentally astute by using cloth diapers. They certainly have changed in the 13 years since I used cloth diapers!

OK, here's my obiglatory picture:
This piece was designed for a wonderful woman I met in one of my networking forays who is a director for Mary Kay. I'm told there are new Director's Suits out this year and they are brown. I was also told that bling is the thing for all things Mary Kay so I used all Swarovski, both crystals and pearls. And lots of 14k gold-fill metal things, too. Click on the photo to see the BIG picture.

The networking experience I've embarked on several months ago has been quite a ride! It's one of the main reasons my poor blog has been pushed under the proverbial couch. So has my Etsy store and my website. But I have met some amazing women these last few months and have learned quite a bit about lots of different things. I will be sharing some of the really cool things I've discovered along the way in the next couple of posts! And hopefully get some more photos worked up of all the new pieces I've been designing.