My first morning back, I had agreed to help the Physical Education department to train their new personal trainers, so I was sweating buckets on a rowing-machine for the first hour of the day. Oddly enough, it put me in a really good mood for the rest of the day, however. Despite the trainee trainer telling me that I had dreadful posture and poor breathing (in far kinder and more polite terms, of course). The good thing about that is that we have been working on that for a couple of subsequent sessions and I realise that I do have terrible posture. Not helped last Saturday by spending a couple of hours picking up rusty nails on a derelict rail-yard in glasgow...
It was good to take stock of everything that had happened over the previous two weeks and to look over my Istanbul treasures, fantastic bits of metal, a huge chunk of chain from the loom we found, and lots and lots of books and gemstones.
Included quartzes galore...
Aquamarines as big as boiled sweets...
Phenomenal tourmalines...
Gifts of rusty metal and glass beads...
And some beautiful enamelled watch parts from Umut:
Now I have to think about using them!
I've also been catching up on commissions, largely smaller stuff which came on the back of the show, earrings, and rings and a re-make of my "File Pendant" which I made last year. I really like the new one better than the original.
More later in the week!