August 16, 2010

Photography - there's always room for improvement! I thought my first picture was "pretty" good - good enough for listing this set of beads - but as the day wore on and I thought about it, I decided it was a pretty "blah" picture




so decided to re-shoot it - this week, I'm trying something different - taking a picture on a mirror.



Definitely worth the extra time it took, I think.

August 7, 2010

Two days worth of torching, and one small handful of little beauties! Take a look at these? Can you imagine that a couple of these tiny beads have as many as 36 dots! Most have around 18. Of course, this doesn't include the rejected ones - the god awful yellow ones that are just plain gaudy - the ones that came out just a bit too small, and a couple that came out too big. The interesting thing about lampwork is that in alot of cases, you just don't know what the finished bead is going to look like till you see it. Alot of the glass colors look different when they are hot (molten)....like red. Red turns black when it gets hot. Try and make a red bead with black dots - you're working blind.



I am pleased to have a commission to create another necklace like this picture - just tickled! It will probably take one more session at the torch to make sure I have a good selection of beads for this beauty -

August 6, 2010

Are these not Cool! And so easy to make. The instructions by Cindy Gimbone are in the Aug issue of Step by Step Wire Jewelry - if you need them. They don't give the instructions for making the lampwork bead though. I just used somewhere between 3-3 1/2" of 14 g wire, made sure that the glass was melted onto as much of the wire as I could, then wire wrapped it and used my ring mandrel to bend the ring into shape. Such a fun, easy project! I'll "antique" the copper wire ones in Liver of Sulphur.

August 4, 2010

Twas a hot and humid run today. Aila was happy to get watered down with the hose once we got home. It helps her cool off a bit quicker I think.

I've put a couple of my older items on Artfire on Clearance today. It's time to make room for some new items. I've also listed a couple of new items there, as well as on Etsy.

August 2, 2010

The start of my birthday month. I see no reason why I shouldn't celebrate for the whole month - and to start off with, DH has decided to join me in this lampwork adventure. He's been copper coring beads for me - and NO, we did not buy any of the machines out on the market that will make coring easy for you. We have a disk cutter for cuttong bead caps, a couple of hammers for texturing, and a dapping set for forming the bead caps, and for securing the bead cap to the bead. See how well he has formed the core to capture the bead cap! This is not just a slight flare as I have seen some of the machines do - it is a well formed flare that forms itself to the bead cap (or bead) -

With whatever I've done in the past, I tend to be a tool minimalist. And believe me, I was ready to go out and buy a neat coring machine. Thanks to DH, we've not only saved ourselves some money, we are continuing to do what we love without collecting a bunch of "one use tools".