I'm continuing to work on the encased poked flower bead technique, and while I think I've gotten pretty good at identifying what I'm doing wrong, I still haven't found out how to do it right. I found a tutorial on Etsy tht explains how to do the beads, and contacted the artist who wrote the tutorial to confirm that her technique was appropriate for the rather basic equipment I'm using. She confirmed it was, so I went ahead and bought the tutorial. I'm hoping it shows up soon, as I've been working on this off-and-on for nearly three months and am starting to get frustrated.
Speaking of frustrated, I've been wearing the Spica wrist brace for more than three weeeks now with no improvement; since I was told this should clear up in two weeks I'm thinking that maybe I need to go to the next step. I really don't want a cortisone injection, but I'm not seeing any way around it at this point. Bummer