the better to see you with

I found the glass eyes!

I was looking through a box to find a clasp for the red necklace and there they were!

YEAH!!

so now I can start working on a design for the bead embroidery part that will be the center piece of the blue and gold necklace
and the better NOT to hear you with

for the past couple of months whenever I walked into the family room and the TV wasn't on I could hear a persistent high pitched hum

the DH was no help, it was a high enough pitch that he simply didn't hear it

my daughter and son-in-law had been here, they could hear it, so I knew it wasn't just me loosing what's left of my mind

I tried unplugging every electric thing in the room -- no luck, I could still hear it

yesterday afternoon I was picking up a pile of wet towels from the clean up of the spill of an entire glass of Coke (a whole other issue, best left not discussed) and the sound seemed a lot louder

what?! there was no electric anything there ---- I moved a few more things around and discovered that these three hand held electronic games had been stacked together --- then something else had been piled on top of that, pressing on enough buttons to send one of them (I'm not sure which one) into SHRIEK mode

mystery solved!! wow, and my ears get a rest!!
last year I had entered this very cool necklace in a competition, only to have the center glass focal bead broken by the post office during the shipping process (at least that's the story from the folks that received it though it could have been dropped at their end)

when I made my bead order back in January, I ordered some more of the faceted pieces that I had used in this in hopes of creating something else from the remains

yesterday, as I was thinking about taking it apart I started to toss the broken pieces into the trash when I though -- wait! beach glass!

so, sometime in the near future I will be setting up the tumbler again with these pieces inside -- but I also want to try "cutting" some bigger pieces of glass to tumble too, so that I'm doing a full "load" when I set it up

we'll see how that all goes

progress on Christmas sweater -- 11.22%

other knitting and quilting projects are moving right along too, and I've started working on the apron

onward!