Linda's Magic Workshop - Linda Britt Design

Taking a day trip to Jerome AZ should not be such a big deal for three girlfriends since we live in Prescott – not so far away.   Finding a day that worked for all of us took a while!   I’ve wanted to go to Nellie Bly ‘the biggest kaleidoscope store in the world’ for 16 years!   They have been open for 25 years but I’ve only known they existed for 16.     We left at 10 a.m. and lunched in Jerome at ‘Grapes’.   Each of us ordered a different dish and shared great food and fun.     Sounds like a girl’s day out, doesn’t it?   We visited just about every store.   Of course, I stayed in Nellie Bly’s a long time.   I just missed the annual workshop teaching how to make those incredible tubes of color and changing shapes.   It’s on my calendar for next year. If you haven’t guessed, I’m crazy for kaleidoscopes.   Once when there were many things happening in my life, I took a class called ‘Changes’.   There was discussion on why and how changes affect us, what we could do to help ou

One of the benefits of taking online classes is building an arsenal of techniques that can be drawn on to produce the design that is in the mind’s eye.     After practicing making transfers to polymer in Heather Campbell’s class, a design idea popped into my head that could incorporate some of my own photographs into my polymer jewelry.   Looking through my photographs (I have hundreds..really) and deciding which images to use took a little time!   I made digital copies and turned them into black and white photographs, reduced them to contact sheet size and printed them using the toner printer.    Then I rolled out the creamy blend of white and Sahara Fimo polymer clay to #3, placed it on a tile and put a thin coating of clay softener over the clay.   The cut out images were placed upside down on the clay.   As you can see from the photo to the finished piece, the image is reversed.  If there is writing that is very important!  Learning to burnish the images with my fing

My good friend’s husband passed away after 11 years of fighting lymphoma and leukemia.   This past year was terrible for both of them as they struggled to be positive and useful and loving.   I visited with her one afternoon and I listened as she told me how she will miss his presence, his humor, his wit and his nightly, “Good Night, Beautiful”.   She is, of course, glad he is no longer in pain and she has removed the reminders of that pain from the house.   We both know the reminders live within her and will fade with time as the good memories take over.   A doctor once told me that losing a loved one leaves a hole inside.   That hole can be likened to the hole in a doughnut.   The hole is there with healing around it.    I opened my memory box to share some of the pain and some of the humor I remember so well from my husband’s dying.    My friend was concerned about getting the ashes to another state.   I shared the story of picking out the container for my husband’s ashes kno