Happy New Year 2016!

I'm so happy to be ending this year and looking forward to a new start tomorrow. Personally it's been a difficult year for me with my knee injury followed by knee replacement surgery in November. See the results in my last post. I see the surgeon next week and hope to keep moving forward with no more health issues this coming year.

It was a great year for me creatively thanks to participating in the #2015PCChallenge and creating many new items for it I discovered many new techniques that I am gradually improving on.I will give you an overview of what I've been creating since my last post about this challenge. This is the last blog post where you will be inundated with so much stuff. I intend to spend this year refining my techniques and focusing on completing more projects for sale. I hope to continue updating my Etsy shop and adding more polymer clay jewelry and components to it. My first goal is a Valentine's Sale so keep your eyes peeled for that!

coaster

So that's the end of #2015PCChallenge for me. It was a great experience and I learned so much and came to know some great, talented polymer clay artists. I actually managed to produce something new for every week of the year and am quite proud of that accomplishment.

Thanks to all my readers for joining me in this challenge . I wish you a very 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Busy times!

So, I survived the knee replacement in November and count myself lucky. Having some down time totally focused on myself without distractions such as clay play, reading, Netflix, etcetera has been an interesting time for me. The pain from the surgery was so bad for the first week that I couldn't do much of anything else. However, I count myself lucky  that my recovery is almost over. Through friends and family I have heard of the sufferings of many people and my issues pale in comparison. It's good to put your own problems in perspective!

That's not to say that I haven't had a few hiccoughs along the road to recovery. As I mentioned the pain was very bad post op and it took a few days in hospital to get it under control! Once I got home I developed severe sciatica from the soft mattress I was sleeping on temporarily. The back and leg pain were much worse than the surgical pain! Once I got back to my own bed ( firm mattress) all signs of sciatica disappeared. I hope nobody is offended by this photo. My knee 3 days postop:

After a couple of days at home I developed a odd feeling of chest discomfort that I knew wasn't normal so I pushed myself to go to emergency at midnight as much as I didn't want to! Sure enough after a few tests including a CT scan at 4:00 am they found a pulmonary embolus ( dreaded blood clot in lungs). Since I was already on blood thinners after the surgery they just increased the dose and sent me home. Being a nurse and having witnessed critical incidents and deaths from pulmonary embolus made this a very frightening experience for me. Luckily for me it all resolved within a week or two.

I was making very good progress with movement and exercise and feeling pretty good about things until last week.  Then I noticed two strange streaks of red coming out of the incision line on my knee and my knee was slightly swollen and discoloured. Doctor's were concerned re: wound infection with joint involvement but everything checked out well and I was sent home on antibiotics for 10 days. Hopefully that's the end of complications from this routine (!!!) surgery. 

 Since the Christmas holiday weekend was coming I decided to get it checked out earlier rather than later. Back to emergency again!! Not my favorite place by 

As you can see I've been a bit occupied these past weeks but have also been busy with polymer clay. I couldn't post a lot because I was making  Christmas presents and a few sales from my Etsy shop! I didn't get much photography done so there's not been much to show you. I will try to take some photographs over the next few days and post some pictures of my new stuff, including the final weeks of #2015 PCChallenge to catch up on that .

I hope everyone who celebrates it had a lovely Christmas celebration / winter solstice. Here's a picture of the full moon on Christmas night, apparently quite a rare occurrence.Enjoy!