Space, the final frontier

Spent some time on the torch yesterday, and played with silver foil, rubino, and some blue transparents. I was a little heavy-handed with the rubino on the lower one, but I love the outer space feel to these.

Crazy week

It's been a crazy-busy week but I'm getting back in the groove, I made some beads today, and hopefully some of them turned out. I am doing my first outdoor show in September, just 2 weeks before the West Michigan Bead Expo. I have no idea how I am going to have enough product without quitting my job. :)

Joy

I stumbled across Kate Leiper's work the other day, and I am just enamored with her art. Her animals have the most wonderful expressions, and the details are simplay amazing. I've made her web site my home page at work, and I keep changing my desktop wallpaper. I am definitely a dog person; this guy's been up a whole day. :) I love this quote from her profile, "Whenever I read words, an image comes to mind; yet images offer a glimpse of what can’t be expressed in words."

Take a look around her site, and enjoy!

20 years ago tonight

On June 5, 1989, one day after the Chinese army's deadly crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, a single, unarmed young man stood his ground before a column of tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Captured on film and video by Western journalists, this extraordinary confrontation became an icon of the struggle for freedom around the world.

{body of snipped article here}

In the end, his identity remains a mystery, but the symbolism of his act of defiance continues to have power. "That story ... is not getting weaker because of time. Because we don't know who he is, it's actually getting stronger," says Xiao Qiang of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley. "In the long frame of history ... human freedom, courage, dignity will stay and prevail, and that's what that picture will testify [to] forever."