Aardvark Art Glass

Jean Yates is the #1 fan of my painted beads. Here she is showing her love by creating this excellent chain maille necklace using three of my giant beads. As you can see, Jean does not clown around with her materials–she only uses the best quality stuff along with beads she buys from artists that we all know and love. Here’s a link to some of her for sale work. As you can see she is a true supporter of the bead community always promoting other people’s work.

We are all eagerly awaiting the January ‘08 release of Jean’s book “Links”. It’s available on Amazon for pre-order now. It features more than 50 projects and portions of interviews with Kim Miles(floral bead lady) Emma Ralph (polymer clay lady), and Me (crazy lady). It promises to be a very satisfactory read. Go order your copy now! Woot!

In other news…the studio has been pretty full with both Patrick and James over here working on stuff. I don’t have quite so much computer time when folks are here but I do intend to list some new stuff tonight on Ebay including a Leafman bead. Patrick is working on some insect paintings including a stink bug and a butterfly. Stink bugs are striking black and red beetle-looking-types. FYI: Stink bugs are not beetles (coleptera) but rather true bugs (hemiptera). One difference between the two is in their mouthparts–beetles have chewing mouthparts while true bugs have sucking mouthparts.

All of this I am reading from the book “BUGS” by Frank Lowenstein. My pals Phil and Renee gifted this book to me many years ago and it is still my go to book for bug information. It is quite large, this book–as big as a record album. It appears to be a kids book but it’s got a lot of scientific information in it. If you go to Amazon to buy Jean’s book you may want to get this one too. And also Karen Leonardo’s book with my mask bead tutorial. Then you can get free shipping. Woot!