Custom Lana Hoops

I was asked to make a pair of my Lana Hoops a little different than I have them listed. This customer wanted them longer , oxidized and she wanted 14k gold earwires. On my suggestion, I tumbled the oxidized hoops to a wonderful gun-metal gray. I think it works really well with the gold. I love making custom orders and it's fun sometimes to see what ideas others come up with that (I hope) I can make real. It's also fun to see a "gee I love these earrings but would love them better if they did this..." idea. My customer was really pleased and that makes me happy too.

Pleasure Principle

I recently posted a silly thread on the Etsy forums called Things I Like. Thinking about it later, I realized that a lot of pleasurable things other people were posting don't even occur to me anymore. In the past couple of years, my life has become so insular and isolated that my previous ideas of pleasure - even at a simple, everyday level - have been transformed into the "I've heard of that", not even the "I used to do that". It's not that I don't find pleasure in things (I started the thread afterall), it's just startling how dramatically what they are has changed.

All this leads to two conclusions:
1) you never know how something silly like that thread can provide profound fodder for self-examination, and
2) it's a really good thing I found something like jewelry making, that I can do at home alone, that gives me such pleasure. Else I'd be shitouttaluck.