Friday morning update

Today is my first official Friday off since I switched to part time at my day job, so I thought I'd kick off the day with a blog post.

Latest updates - Stephanie has, in her words, "wood fever" and I have some sort of curse that hopefully will wear off soon.

Steph's wood fever - in my last post I featured a photo of an upcoming wooden pendant that Stephanie is working on. We've got another that is amazing and probably ready to post (picture below). She's still working on some silver projects but has been spending a lot of time on these awesome, exotic wood pieces. Recently we have been competing for time on the equipment in the wood shop, but my curse has freed up a lot of machine time for Steph.

Jeff's curse - I've had one of those weeks when things just don't seem to be going the right away. Everything is a few degrees more difficult than it should be, culminating in a fairly serious run in between my left index finger and the blade from a biscuit joiner that was spinning at about 11,000 RPM. That hurt - a lot - and still does. It's been 36 hours since the injury and I haven't seen a doctor under strong protest by Steph. I'll spare the gory details but suffice it to say that it appears the finger will survive, albeit looking a bit different than it has in the past. I'm fairly handy with first aid and didn't see any flesh that could be stitched up to close the wound, so I took care of it myself. There's no signs on infection and I *think* the wound is trying to close, but if it starts to show infection or looks bad at the next dressing change then I'll be off to the doctor for what I'm sure will be an excruciating exam and condescending reprimands. Pictures of the injury are available on request, but are definitely not for the weak of heart. Think finger meets bloody hamburger . . .

I also fell through the bedroom ceiling from the attic, sanded down the tip of my right thumb until it bled, and several other silly mishaps. This has all been in the last five days. The finger hurts real badly and isn't really usable since I've splinted it to it's neighbor to try and keep the flesh from moving around while it heals. That means I'm typing with only eight fingers, so bear with me.

I'll still got plenty to work on during recovery - I've got a set of runes cut and ready to burn, a few rune pendants roughed out and ready for design, and my latest great product idea - tumbled stones. Stay tuned for more on the tumbled stone front.

Steph has several pieces close to ready for sale plus a very nice pair of art nouveau earrings that she listed since my last entry. If you remember the amazing silver leaf and stick clasp that she made for a bracelet we sold a few weeks ago then you'll like one of the new projects she's working on.

We still need more facebook likes, so please encourage your friends to like our page. Every time that happens all of the new "liker's" friends see our link and bring us lots of traffic. You don't have to endorse us, just liking us is plenty. Even if no one buys anything more clicks raise us up in search results, both internal at Etsy and via external search engines.

I'm also ready to start looking to alternate distribution channels, preferrably not eBay, so if you have any ideas we'd love to hear them. I've heard a lot about artfire.com but haven't checked it out yet, so any opinions of that site are welcomed.

Here's some cruddy phone cam eye candy for today. Better shots will come with final listings.

This is Steph's sweet new wooden necklace that may be listed as soon as today. The wood is amazing and the polish she put on it is perhaps the best to come out of our wood shop yet.

Here's a set of wooden Futhark runes that I have in development. The runes are just penciled on there and hopefully will be burned in soon.

This is a prototype rune necklace we made. I don't know if this one will make it for sale as we have much nicer pieces of wood, this was just practice. We also are likely to accessorize it a bit with a bead or two or perhaps some interesting knotwork in the cord. Since this isn't likely to get listed, email us if you are interested in it - we'll make you a good deal and customize the necklace however you'd like.

And to wrap things up, a brief documentary of my days of misfortune. First is a picture of my aching finger, next is the view from my bedroom after my attic/ceiling mishap.

Thanks for reading, subscribe to our blog, share our links with everyone you know, and as they say in the open air markets in Mexico - "Hey, come buy my junk!"

Respectfully submitted, Jeff.