As usual, I went AWOL on this blog, but now I’m back and have some upcoming projects that you’ll hear more about soon. Warning, after an overhaul of my flickr account, a lot of image links in old posts are broken. I’m too lazy and too busy to bother fixing them. Sorry.  I promise all the new photos will work properly.

I’ve signed up for a new photo-related project, but I’m not going to tell you quite yet what it is… As soon as I sort out a few details I’ll give you the full scoop.

In the meantime, Stephanie has a fantastic project going on that you should know about… she has gone above and beyond for 5 of our sponsored children. She’s coordinated with Aura’s House to raise funds for desperately needed “extras” for these kids, including a roof for one of the houses and capital to start their own income generating ventures to lessen the need for donations.

Aura’s House has a unique history of charitable fundraising that you can read on their website, and 100% of the funds go to support the projects. They have great visibility and a fantastic reputation, so this is a huge opportunity for some of our sponsored children to receive some much needed assistance, beyond what we could do ourselves. Additionally, Bank of America is even offering triple-matching funds on one of the projects.

Aura’s House is very selective about what projects they will take on, and they only support an extremely small number at one time. The five currently supported projects were all initiated by Stephanie, which is a clear demonstration of her hard work and dedication! (A husband could not be more proud than I am…) Stephanie has worked tirelessly to get the projects to this point, and now it’s up to the rest of us. I hope that you will choose to make a donation to one or all of these projects, however small. Everything counts! Please visit Aura’s House to make a contribution.

I’ve added a Pen Gallery to display examples of the types of pens that I make. You can click-through any photo to see a larger version on Flickr. While some of these photos are availble in old blog posts, and all of them are on my flickr page, this provides any easy way to have a look at pens I’ve made in the past. Keep in mind that not all of my pens are shown here, just a sample.

This was made a lot easier thanks to a handy wordpress plugin called flickrrss that uses (wait for it…) your flickr RSS feed to retrieve photos for display on a wordpress-managed site. I love it when simple tools do a job well.

I decided to consolidate my domains, and move my blog over here to flaminglotuscreations.com/blog. It’s accessable via the newly designed front page flaminglotuscreations.com. Part of this is a switch from Blogger to Wordpress, which gives me a bit more flexibility. If there are any hiccups I apologize, and please let me know.  Thanks for your support!