Greetings everyone, and welcome to the 2008 holiday season! (like it or not!) I hope your Halloween was hauntingly happy! Now it's time to gear up for that crazy time of year. Isn't nice to know we can go out to our torches and get lost in the fun of the flame! I hope you are getting some time on your torch...and I hope you have been working on a nice vessel for the bead exchange for our holiday meeting coming up December 13th.

Have you been on the SCFS website lately? We have a new FORUM set up! (home page, click on FORUM in top menu) Please take a moment to register then check out the topics, including tips & tricks, sales & swaps and what I hope will be very helpful, carpooling to meetings! This is a great way for those who may have a long commute to share rides. Get to know fellow lampworkers and make the drive more fun! You can use this forum to make announcements about local events, home shows, bead sales, etc. Be sure to check it out.

Our biggest SCFS get together will be happening in a little over a month at Pacific Art Glass. We are working hard to make this meeting as much fun as they've been in the past and we hope you will be there! We are very excited to have Larry Brickman joining us as our guest artist. Larry is well known for his precision dot beads and is a wealth of information for both creating beads and technical aspect of lampworking. He will be demoing for us as well as talking about what the ISGB has to offer us.

As I mentioned above, our bead exchange will be vessels, which we demoed at our September meeting. This is a great opportunity to try one if you never have! The pot luck theme will be "Savory Snacks". We will also have our 2nd annual collection of beads for Beads of Courage. Purple hearts are expecially needed, but any and all beads are welcome. Any one bringing beads for BOC will receive 1 free raffle ticket. And speaking of the raffle, a portion of our raffle sales will be dontated to BOC along with the beads. So bring plenty of $$$'s for raffle tickets! I will announce some of the prizes in the next newletter.

BABE! will be held on November 8th & 9th at the Oakland Marriott City Center in Oakland. In additon to a huge bead show, there are lots of great classes being held throughout the weekend. More info: www.beadextravaganza.com

A big thank you to our webmistress, Carey Conley who worked very hard to put the new Forum together. We hope you will get some good use of it. Have a great month, Happy Thanksgiving and we'll see you next month!

Cheers~
Judy Carlson
President
So Cal Flame Surfers
www.socalflamesurfers.org

If anyone would like anything more posted let me know and I will me more than glad to post it. admin@socalflamesurfers.org