CREATE NJ--Day 1 + Giveaway

I'm having a giveaway to win one of the new Tim Holtz stamp sets.  Click here to get in on the fun.

Finally finished up some projects from Create NJ, so I guess I should start posting about it.  Andrea & I were signed up for 5 classes, and the 1st was on Wednesday night.  I couldn't wait to get down to Somerset for this artsy event, and what made it even more special was my birthday!

While checking in at the Doubletree, the girl surprised me by wishing me a happy birthday.  How sweet!  I found my friend, Eileen B., who I met on a couple of the Tim Holtz cruises, and chatted with her while waiting for Andrea to arrive.  When I got back to my room, Andrea was there, and so was this:

Talk about sweet!  I was thinking "boy, Doubletree really makes you feel special!"  Which they did, but actually, it was Andrea who arranged for this wonderful little surprise.  Gotta love her!

We had a quick dinner, and it was off to our first class, Banner Wrap Beach Glass.  I wasn't sure what we were going to do with the seaglass, but my hubby, Rick, and I spent many a weekend this year collecting the stuff so Andrea & I had plenty to play with.

Our instructor, Eve Sherman, was fabulous!  She had seaglass for us, but I brought down alot to share with the class.  Here are a few of her beautiful pendants:

I love seaglass, so deciding which piece to use was a difficult choice.

 I finally settled on this guy.

The technique was a little tricky at first (turns out she forgot to mention the little tricks to make it easier!  lol), but I just love my first piece.

 

Unfortunately, Eve forgot the little spacer beads she uses on the banners, so she had some Roman Glass for us to use instead of the crystals.  We'd never heard of this before ... turns out it's about 2,000 years old and comes from Afganistan(?).

Although I liked the Roman Glass, I thought my particular piece of seaglass was too small for these larger pieces, so instead of making a banner, I coiled up all my wires, and I love how it turned out!

We had plenty of time to make a 2nd piece, so I chose to use copper wire for my wrapping.  This one was much easier now that we knew the tricks!  I went with a much larger piece of seaglass so I could try the banner technique.  I also chose a fairly large piece of Roman Glass, layered with a smaller piece.

 

I've got to practice a bit more with this technique.  I didn't realize that we were supposed to 'swoop' our wire down across the glass.  Looks fine to me. I'm happy.

Eve was nice enough to take some pics of Andrea & I while we were busily working:

 There were only 6 of us in class!

Here's one of Andrea's pieces with mine:

The piece of seaglass she chose had some wire inside it!  It's cool to see the 'layered' effect of the wires.  She used copper wire, and added 5 pieces of Roman Glass on top.

Our classmates took some pics of us with teacher:

 This was the piece Eve was working on while teaching us:

 Three proud jewelry designers showing off our pieces!

 Pieces our classmates made:

Our first class was alot of fun.  When I got home and showed these to my Rick, he thought they were awesome!  He thinks I'm going to start cranking these out and making mega bucks!  lol  He's so cute!  He loves the fact that I'm using all the seaglass we've been hunting for the last few months!