My favorite of these are the open safety pins. I don’t think I have any more safety pins. Making future bottlecaps is going to be limited by my dwindling supply of weird tiny stuff. I used to get great stuff by cleaning my kids’ rooms. Barbie shoes, beads, scraps of paper, etc. They’ve outgrown toys now, and are slightly tidier, so there goes that.  Maybe I can find someone else with a messy kids’ room…

These magnets contain some of my niftier findings.  I took apart a watch to get the gears in the upper right. They aren’t as fun as all-metal gears, but plastic watch gears aren’t radioactive, unlike some of the radium dusted (it glows! In the dark!) ones from last century.  I like the transistors too, and the mirror tile.  I’ve been saving dead watch parts, so every collection of magnets I do might have a watch band buckle.

Just a reminder, if you want to come over to www.katercheek.com, you can read more about the progress of my epublishing project.  Look for Seeing Things, a new urban fantasy, due out September 1st, 2011.

First step in creating these plates was to roll out wedged clay on the slab roller. You can see the texture of the canvas.  Second step was to stamp all over the slab using commercial rubber stamps.  I especially like the text background stamps.

Dear Blog Friends,

So here’s my big update.

I’m planning to epublish my first novel. If it goes well, I’m going to follow it with the second and third, to make a nice, neat trilogy.

This is the plan, and it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.  Bear in mind that I’m not a coward. I’ve backpacked by myself across Poland without a guidebook, broken bricks with my hand, and hitchhiked in Japan,  I’ve played with fire (literally), I’ve ridden poorly trained horses, I’ve crashed parties at which I was the only American, I’ve tried very hard in this life to (as Weird Al Yankovic puts it) “grab life by the lips and yank as hard as [I] can.”

Epublishing my novels still scares me.  These aren’t the only novels I’ve written, but they’re my first, and they’re near and dear to my heart.  I keep thinking about everything that can go wrong, and how hard it is to undertake such a big project alone. But I’m not really alone, am I? I have you guys.

Come on over to my other blog to read the rest.