I feel used! :)

Yes, somebody has used a bead of mine in a piece of jewelry and it's looking great!
I don't usually go around checking up on my buyers, but Archaicdesign was my very first customer on Etsy, and therefore a special case. Once in a while I will swing by her shop and have a peak at her pieces, especially her wonderful bracelets. You can just look at them and know they will last you a lifetime. All that solid fat sterling wire - it's simply delicious :)

Thank you Susan, for the use of your picture.

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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 :)

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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.

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08.08.08

1.000 couples are getting married today in Denmark alone.
Personally I'd rather have 09.09.09 as the date. 8's doesn't do anything for me, but 9's are lovely.

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Holiday Update

Well then, the holiday is over and has been for a while. Seems longer than 4 days though, as we are all ready to fall over from tiredness. It is very hard to change back to workschedule after 3 weeks of sleeping in as your system sees fit.

We had a nice holiday. We spent a week in a rented summer cottage by the sea. The weather was not hot enough for actual bathing, but we took daytrips around the area and visited with relatives, and the week was soon over. Then we had two weeks at home, which the adults enjoyed and the children were bored by.

The first thing I did upon our return, was to ask BF to install the vent I got just before we left. He set it up, and now I have all the vent power a girl could dream of. It is so powerfull I can feel a bit of a breeze from behind, even on the lowest setting. Yay! :)
And I have put it to good use too. I had thought that I would be too busy with family stuff during the holiday weeks to make any beads, but in fact it has been glorious. It is so much easier to get some work done when you know you can continue all night if you are up to it, and then sleep it off in the morning. Even if the kids don't sleep/calm down until 9-10 PM there is still plenty of time for melting glass.
So I have been in a furious workmode and it has been grand. I have made a lot of new beads, and discovered the wonder of the one-hole bead. Once I made a drop bead on the tip of my mandrel, but it broke as soon as I tried to get it off, and I thought maybe I should not do those until I had a kiln. But no, I can do drop beads, and I have a bunch ready for annealing (as soon as possible) in lovely swirly colours.
I have also been making goddesses in a new way. Usually I add whatever bumps needs adding on the body core, but I thought I would try to shape one of the drops into a goddess, and it went very well. I also made a couple with wings ... or at least they were intended to be wings, but people call them arms, baby arms or even ears. I do agree though that I need to work a bit on them as they are very small and could well resemble baby arms (though this suggestion came from my baby who also says 'give me the bunny' when she sees my ladies). In any case, Yay! for a small progress :)

But - now workdays have begun again, and I have been quite exhausted, as has the rest of the family, from getting up about 4 hours earlier than the last 3 weeks. And since I know from experience that lampworking and exhaustion does not mix well, I have only had one short session since sunday. This is bad, bad news as I need to work hard to get a good stock up before the end of october. I am especially low on earring pairs (according to my plan), and I am guessing mine might be the first jewelry booth ever selling neckwear only ;)
Oh well, the neckwear will be lovely :)

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PS: pics will follow as soon as I get some taken (ahem ...)

Ahem ...

I might have been a tad overenthusiastic about my new ventilations system.
Yesterday after a few hours at the torch I thought my lungs weren't feeling as perfect as I would like them to, and I had BF come down and smoke on the contraption.
It does infact have a bit of sucktion, but only within the vent hood. Everything that escapes around the hood is free to do it's damage. I do have the hood as close to the flame as I can, it is plastic after all, and I do expect the heat to bear the fumes up and into it, but apparently it is not good enough.
I could feel my lungs misbehaving a few weeks back too, but I thought it was an overdose of the pollen that was around at the time. Now I don't know ...
I think sitting in the basement is not the best idea, but it is the only place we have right now. I will be spending a lot of time down there over the next 3 months, so I need to have this fixed fast.

Tonight I will not be torching. The last two nights have been bad torching sessions with lots of cracked beads and weird reactions and colourcombos. I think I have been too tired and need a bit of rest. There is always tomorrow, and I have a lot of planning to do still that I can think of tonight.

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Hooray! I just got an extractor hood* from off the Copenhagen freecycle group. How perfect is that :)
Yay!

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*Extractor hood, had to look it up in the dictionary. Never heard it before. One of those hoods that lead the steam outside when you cook. What do you call them?

Supplies, Argh!

Whoa! This show of mine had better be brilliant, because buying supplies is cleaning me out completely. I might have to borrow too ...
Maybe I am overdoing it, but how do I know? I try to picture how a certain amount of e.g. necklaces will look, and then shop according to that, but really I have no idea. It is kind of scary how much one can spend in a few minutes. Well a lot of minutes actually, because I think and consider and reconsider and almost bail out. But then I think 'I need this stuff, go to check-out woman!' and I wave goodbye to my meager funds, once not so meager, but now ... gone. Poof!
Scary, I tell you ...
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