Artisan Clay: Establishing Balance

My life is so strange sometimes.  I guess I should be happy that there's not a lot of drama, but my days just don't seem to be consistent--or balanced.  Yesterday, after a nice run in the morning with all my folks from the office, I ended up with a headache that lasted all day and into the evening.  After making it through the work day with the construction (well, actually destruction) going on outside with a damned jack hammer, I fell asleep at eight.  I didn't wake up until seven.  Eleven hours of sleep?  Seriously?  How do I ever get anything done?  I need to figure out how to do personal task management.  I'm pretty good with tracking projects at work but I'm not good with the things going on here at home...I have a weekend trip to plan, paper boxes to finish, bead soup to work on, dinners to cook, exercising to get in, studying counterinsurgency methods, and so on.  Gotta work on balancing...so off I go with a balanced design!

The unplanned eleven hours of sleep cut into my planned early morning crafting, but I finally got to it this evening...and here it is:  My Artisan Clay Design Team piece for August...just in the nick of time on the evening of the 31st!

Kristie, the artisan behind Artisan Clay, sent out really cool art deco components to the team this month.  Mine was an arc with three connectors in a rustic bronze-grey finish.  I was honestly stumped for a little while since I didn't really want to string anything boring and I was too lazy to do a lot of wirework.  So, when I saw this rusty washer on my worktable, I finally got a shot of inspiration.  That's how I got my "industrial" spin on art deco.  The washer is an actual piece from the wreckage of the wind tunnels behind my office.  I do regular walks around the perimeter fencing to see if there are any cool found objects that might be interesting to work with later.  I have a little bag in the trunk of my car to collect things.  Don't know where they'll end up...heck, Curt was doing me a favor and cleaning my car a few weeks ago and threw everything away.  Know why I love him?  He went and got it all back out of the trash!  (It was all still on top. :)

I have a ton of these wire chokers in my stash, so in lieu of stringing beads or working with chain, I'm keeping it simple and short.  Some may say its the lazy way out...I call it smart editing.  haaaaaaaaa  Oh, and I probably need to explain that the third connector on the clay component was at the peak of the arc and I cut it off and filed away the rough spots--it was kind of a test to see how that would work and it was just perfect!

Thanks again to Kristie and to the rest of the team.  I'm ready for September!!