A Time to Create and a Time to Build Knowledge

This has been a great vacation from school.  I have been slowly creating beautiful gifts for friends and loved ones ~ though I'm far from finished (late Christmas gifts).  My hobby is making jewelry.  I don't simply string; I bend and wrap wires.  I keep all peripheral wires and beads the same size as well as clasps so that they look balanced.  I have memorized the sizes of beads (mm) and wires so I know what they look like proportionately long before I start putting the piece of jewelry together.  
 
I love to gather beautiful findings and beads. I have a preference for blue.  I love pearls and lapis as well as sterling, turquoise and gold-filled chains.  I started playing around with beads, after I left my job with the Air Force over two years.  It has been a joy to work with them and create lovely things.  I'm always thinking about what I need to learn next how to do.  Inevitably after I finish my nursing coursework, I'll take jewelry-making at the college and learn the 'hot' metal aspects of making jewelry.  
I was asked by the Senior Center (Baxter Curran) to teach jewelry-making last fall.  Since I don't know how to do everything, I asked my friend Agnes Brown to teach also as she does work that I have not learned how to do yet.  It was a great afternoon of teaching and learning.