June 2016 FCC

When I first started cabbing and found this board I was blown away by Tela's work and felt like I was sitting at her feet like a child soaking in every picture and bit of training she had to offer. In the highly unlikely event that I beat her it would be more like the upstart rookie finally bested the master - it has to happen eventually or the upstart begins to slide back down into obscurity...

About the theme you guys are thinking way too hard, themes can be subjective from person to person, but it takes multiple different trees to make a forest. A theme helps to consolidate things. The person that brings a palm tree and sand to a pirate theme fits it as easily as the person brings a pirate hat. On its own it does not take one object to make a theme but multiple objects. For instance a few months back we had the black and white theme, someone entered an ivory color cab.. In the grand scheme of things it does fit the theme. Someone once said a narrow theme was a bad idea and an open theme would be be open to a lot of people.

As for the challenge yourself you nailed it Tommy, it is subjective... that is why it is only a challenge to the individual should he or she try to challenge themselves. Last month's theme was actually not one chosen by me, but another respectable member of this website whos name I will not mention but could be found. The overall challenge should be to do the best you can no matter what your doing... if you didn't try to do the best you can, well it probably wouldn't be much of a competition but rather a gathering of cabs.

Overall the "theme" behind every contest, win or lose right or wrong is to have fun. If someone doesn't have fun doing something than people wouldn't do it, and noone knows how fun something can or can't be if they don't try.

Based on what I have seen I will not try to explain my reasoning on this more (you can pm me if you want)

Overall the point is to have fun, this month there is no theme, so if you choose anything that is made into a cab than you can enter. weather or not you challenge yourself is up to you.

If someone else wants to take over creating the contests that is cool with me. It is possible I may need someone to do it starting in a few months depending on what happens. If my monthly expenses become too high I probably won't have internet.


As for what Don and rockjunquie said I can eliminate the before photos and leave it up to people to be honest that they finished the cab that month. I too find that old rule to be annoying and run into the same problems!

Very nice cab also Don!

It is actually, A lot more people new to lapidary have been participating, and overall the entree number is close or more than when carleton was running them, very compatible after I got the template down. I will be entering this month and if 3 more people enter besides me, we will have exceeded the number of entrees since last time carleton ran for this month.

I hope that metalsmith , Garage Rocker and the other new folks that have entered in the past continue to enter and have fun while learning new things.

What I will do is allow the contest winner to decide a theme or if they want no theme. The only requirement is that most people should be able to do it... ie not rocks valued over .50 per gram or carved cabs.

Beautiful cab! Glad you were undeterred. If you had been deterred it would have been exactly the opposite result from the spirit of the conversation.

What a beauty, Gorgeous result with this layout.

Haha, like I didn't have enough on my mind... which way up it goes!!


I'm not saying how many times this was 'finished' then re-cut, polished, re-cut, re-polished. But then I've seen the standard of competition here ... I'm not 'counting my chickens', but thanks for the vote of confidence!