tedb4, you are very welcome!!! I did get your email, (sorry, it wouldn't let me reply without coming to GW) and I mailed your seeds out yesterday. I hope you get them soon! 14 of 15 arabicum seeds sprouted from this order - they are already happy green babies! The obesum are so small compared to the beefy little arabicum! I'm getting good results from the obesum too though, these seem like high quality seeds.

I'm off to the office- we open for half day on Saturdays, so I will be posting the list around noon for the runner-ups! Any last minute suggestions will be considered. I am having a hard time getting it down to 10 selections, and my hubby just added his own suggestions last night! When I post the list, I'm asking you to choose the top three you like, 1-2-3, , and email me your choices. And yes, you can vote for your own suggestion if they make the list!! LOL!! So, if you get a chance, check back after noon today, and vote! Thanks for all the help with choosing a name for this seedling!! Brenda

Thanks, guys. Those glass flowers are amazing! I wish the pictures could be enlarged to see the detail. I have this vague memory that I might have seen the real ones many, many years ago when I visited Boston. They truly are exquisite works of craftmanship, and glass is such a classy material compared with Sculpey clay. It has a translucency that's hard to get with polymer clay. If I make the Sculpey clay really thin, though, the light passes through and makes the petals glow in the sunshine. I'm always striving to get this effect, but it's hard to do. When clay is pressed this thin, it tends to slump either in the forming or in the baking stage. It is definitely a labor of love, but then so is gardening for hummingbirds and feeding them. It is such a thrill to make a feeder and watch them head right for it, take a sip, and zip off, disappearing to parts unknown. Some of my flowers are quite a bit larger than life, and I sometimes chuckle to myself and wonder what those little hummingbirds are thinking when they see a Salvia coccinea that is 3x bigger than it ought to be. "Ay caramba! That's the biggest salvia I ever saw!" I've had my share of failures, but have gotten better and better at making them hummer friendly. Although I try to make them works of art, they remain, first and foremost, functioning hummingbird feeders. Here's a couple more: A NOTE TO CS7580 (Otherwise known as Connie, I think)--If you're seeing this, I just wanted you to know that I tried to send you an email by going through your member page, but I think it didn't go through. I know you were interested in trying to make your own Sculpey clay feeders, and I remembered some instructional things I hadn't mentioned in my original post that might help you with your efforts. If you're interested, maybe you can send me an email by using my member page. Hopefully, it will work for you. Once I have your email, I can get those extra instructions to you. They are very important, and I think you'll have trouble being successful without them.

We went with Ultra Poz because we wanted a more traditional looking pool. I don't like the pebble finishes. The water looks good but I don't like how it looks when you are looking at the actual finish. Ultra-Poz is made by Applied Materials Technologies. The address and phone # I have for them is in Phoenix. They have "a 7 yr. warranty on the entire composition" not just the quartz (taken from their brochure). I was told different information that houseful was though. The brochure I have only has 3 colors: white, sapphire, and emerald. I asked if we could add more of the sapphire crystals so there was more blue and we were told no, that Ultra-Poz is not like 3M, it is pre-mixed so no changes could be made. We were told about Ultra Poz by Blue Wave Pools. When we decided to do o/b we looked into other finishes. From everything I could find to read, Ultra Poz seemed to have more stuff in it to make it last longer than other quartz surfaces so that is why we picked it over 3M. I know 3 other people who have it and they all like it. My pool seems to be a different color than theirs though, a little more aqua and theirs a little more blue. I like it though. I like to look at it when their is a slight breeze and it is nice and sunny out. The water just seems to sparkle. Another thing that helped in our decision making was that we found it to be less splotchy than 3M, at least in the pools we looked at. If you have any more questions just ask. Like I said, we used Swimming Pool Service and Repair. I never would have thought to get a bid from them because of their name, but they were recommended to us. They were great to work with. They do do other finishes too. A close up. Ignore the dirt. Our in-floor cleaning system wasn't working at the time.