Oh my Goddess!

This past week were all about the Goddesses.

Not only did I post 4 Goddess pendants to my shop at Amio.dk, like this one:


The Lady of the Shapely Posterior :)



I also got to send off this beauty halfway across the country, to Marslev on Fyn.



Please click the picture to fully apreciate her gorgeous slender curves

This is one of my new ladies, the largest bunch I have made until now, and her new owner is very pleased. I am so happy that I could make that happen. It is my mission after all, to spread the joy of lovely curves, captured in glass.

This week I will post a couple of these beauties to my shop, and I hope to get in a bit of torchtime too. I have a Goddess project I am quite eager to create. But - it's a secret for now, and I'm not telling ;)

Have a beautiful week,

Lene

Thing-a-day: Feb. 25 (Beads & Sculptures)

New beads!


All made yesterday. This is what I usually make in a productive week (or two).
I could so use more days off ...

P~

Thing-a-day: Feb. 14 (Glass Art Sculptures)

Maybe not a forrest quite yet, but it's a beginning.
These aren't glued, just cut and ready to be.



P~

Angel in progress

I just made a little post in the 'Creative Scandinavians Blog', about this lovely lady:


Wings are new to me, but I like it :)

P~

Bead Pictures!

Well, here we go :)
First, the shapes that will live after being cooled down in my new Japanese annealing bubbles, even when quite large. The ones on the right are the ones that look like Sue's ATC.


Next - dots.
Love those plunged bubbles.


My newly discovered love - drop beads. I will glue a bail into the hole and they will be quite nifty. Some are based on Ivory,


some on nice swirly odd lots from Vetrofond.


Some of them have been shaped further.


These ladies are all made with just a hole at the top. I look much forward to seeing one finished and on a chain. I have only silver bails, so I suppose I should get some sterling chains, though a black rubber cord would be lovely too.
The 3 ivories in the top row are the angel experiment I did, the 'baby-arm' godesses. I have already made a better one, but I don't think it would hold up to being a pendant, so I'll experiment further on making the wings more solid.


That's all for now.

P~

Highlights -

of the last couple of days:

Friday: Ooh friday. That was the day that Lydia Muell put up beads for sale. I had kept an eye out during the week after seeing her beads on LE, but I thought I would not be home at the time she would list them. As it happened I had put her in a wrong timezone and the actual listing time were 2 hours later than I had thought, and I were so ready!
I refreshed and refreshed and wondered how many others were doing that too and if her site would take it. I had almost convinced myself that it would be okay if I didn't get it, but as I refreshed once more the beads were up and I clicked and checked out and typed as fast as I could.
And Voilá, this is the latest addition to my bead/glass collection :)


Thank you Lydia for letting me use your picture

I am very excited about this one and have been sketching a bit regarding what I want to do with it. If I can pull it off it will be fit for a queen, but I shall keep it for myself :) Don't know when and with what I can possibly wear it though ... Go visit Lydias blog and website for stunning bead overload!

Also on friday, non bead related: My boyfriend has been looking at cars for a while. The one we have is an unsafe, noisy, smokey rustbucket, but it gets us where we want to go. We don't trust it for longer trips though, and with the holiday/vacation time coming up, he has made a serious effort, and on friday he picked up our new car! It is a whole new experince I tell you. It is silent, runs smooothly and there is more room on the backseat for the litle ones. I feel quite grown up when driving it, it feels like a 'real' car. Yay!

Weekend: There is a dot craze going on over at www.Lampworketc.com for all the wrong reasons, but none the less I have been inspired to do some too. I should probably not show off my own beads right after the glory of Lydias, but here we go anyway :)

The black and silver one was odd. I placed dots as 6-leafed flowers around the bead, melted them in and they were all well placed with a tiny line of black between them. When I reduced to get the silver out they grew right into each other and are just silvered areas now. Hard to see on the black, but very shiny.

The green one was odd too. There are actually 2 very different colours of green dots on that surface, they just look exactly the same. You can see the outlines of the top dots on the lower ones though.

The blue one has a very nice shape and weight. I have not cleaned it out of fear it might crack cause it's kind of big. But I'd like the blue dots closer together, the center dots are too big and not all shiny, and almost all of the tiny black dots are undercut.

Now the purple one came out nicely. The colours go well together (seashell base, some purple on top and iris blue mini dots), the purple dots came close together and the small metallic dots all went metallic and settled in well. It's a nice bead. But the thing is - everybody is doing it, and they all look just like it, so it doesn't feel like it's my creation. It does not make me happy.

These next ones may be simple, but they are all mine and that makes me happy :)

(Sorry about the fussyness that hurts my eyes. I shall replace asap)








Monday: Yesterday I went to have a bag full of beads annealed at my local glass supplier. I should have them back in a few days by mail. While I were there of course I had to get a couple of rods too :) I got black, white and both Ivories of Moretti as I were running out of those.
I also got a goldstone rod, one with the goldstone on the outside. I have tried the one that is incased in clear and find there are too much clear around it so now I will try the other kind. I don't use it much though, I'm not a glittery girl.
I also got 2 short rods of Double Helix glass that I look much forward to trying. I'll have to read up on how to work them first though, as I don't want to waste them. I got Terra and Chaos. This should be fun :)
And I had a good look at their kiln. They sell only that one, and the good thing about it is that apparently it doesn't use too many Amps when running, which is just what I need. It runs high enough for silver clay too, which I want to try later. I'll have too search around for a better price though, as danish prices are over the roof. It's the MF5 from Nabertherm in Germany. I'll go and look what else they have :)

P~

Something new!

I finally got into my workshop with my new glass this weekend, and the first thing I wanted to do was one of my 'things I'd like to try'. I used my beloved Effettre Ivory, a dollop of my new Vetrofond odd light amber and a bit of Vetrofond odd lot Cosmic Storm stringer, and I went ahead and tried my hands at my first off-mandrell piece.

Now this is something completely different from making beads on a mandrel. In stead of inventing the wheel all over again, I decided to try a heart. It is quite possible I should have made just a little bit of research, but instead I just jumped in with both feet. I heated a blob of ivory on the end of the rod, added globs of amber and twirled a bit of Cosmic Storm around it.
I squished the whole thing fairly flat, heated the appropriate area and made a cut diagonally across from the rod and halfway through the disc. This makes 2 pointy ends that when heated ends up as the 2 round top parts of a heart. The center and pointy end of my heart were a bit skinny, but it didn't occur to me to add more glass as I were ballancing the hot mass trying to avoid melting the rod too much and losing the whole thing.
I also tried to poke a hole through the upper center so the heart might be hung when finished, but when I poked from one side, the hole from the other side would close up and just show a little point where it had been. So I gave up on that, and now I have a small heart to decorate my home in some fashion.
Not a raging success, but definately fun, and definately something I will try again.


Front and back. Yup, it's tiny :)

I also made a few beads in black and white, much like this one, which I haven't done in a long time, and some more of the jupiter spacers. I think I have enough now for the necklace I am contemplating, my first planned project. Now I need to work on some teeth beads so I can have a bunch available for my shop, they always sell fast :)

P~

Glass Art! Can't live without it :)

Okay, so when I said I were completely off international shopping, that of course does not include Etsy. Etsy is my special friend and I have shopped again.

This time from the long time admired AngelinaBeadalina. Angela makes amazingly large pieces for a lampworker, and though not all of her work appeals to me, I am frequently blown away by her organic flowing shapes. I thought about it and found that the faces she make are too chunky for me, but the long slender women figures are so what I want to see. Then going through her gallery I realized I rather love some of her faces too, like this one, or this. So overall, a most definate thumbs up :)
Now the thing is, she is holding a ridiculous sale of $25 a piece for 25 items in 25 days. I don't know how long is left, it can't be much, but that is not a sale, it's a give-away! And I lucked out and checked her shop at just the right time. I am now the happy owner of 'Essence of a Woman'. I saw this piece posted online before, and imediately loved the strong, happy, free shape of this dancing goddess. How can you not? She is just glorious.


Thank you Angela, for the use of your beautiful picture

Apparently I can't hold on to money when I've got them. However if I don't have any to use for fun and frivolity, then I can. It all works out nicely, and I'd like to propose a toast: To unexpected Tax Returns, Hoopla! :)

I do hope the postal service will cooperate this time, because I can't wait to get my mail !!!

P~
(Glass Art Collector, Yay!)