One step forward, two steps back...

E-commerce software.  Want it, need it, have it, but what I have sucks.

I've got Zen Cart and it's just too big for what I want to do.  Anyone have any suggestions?

This is probably about a hundred hours wasted trying to get this thing to do what I want, but it was all a learning process, even if I end up going with something else.  Especially if I end up going with something else.

Oh, and of course, I don't wanna pay for it. LOL

It's past midnight and I'm just gonna go to bed.  I'll post about the silver tomorrow.  I promise!

Time flies...

Wow, I can't believe it's been a week since my last post!  OK, down to business.

I've been making beads, lots of beads.  Little itty bitty spacer beads, huge (by my standards) focal beads, and experimenting with all sorts of other stuff too, like silver foil, silver wire, ivory, my new lentil press, the ribbed marver, and layering different colors.  Some of that stuff, like the silver foil and the wire, I worked on tonight, so I'll post about my first attempts with silver foil tomorrow when they come out of the kiln.  Tonight I'm gonna talk about ivory and making focals.

Day before yesterday one of my coworkers was wearing a green dress with a cobblestone pattern on it, and it suddenly hit me that I could make a bead FOR the dress, for my coworker.  I saw a bead in my mind's eye, and went home that night and tried to make it.  I got close, but I think it needs some silver, maybe a fancy bail or a chain, or maybe even silver directly on the glass.  It was hard enough just to get it to somewhere resembling the shape I was hoping for so I just left it plain.  I went ahead and gave it to her the next day, hopefully she wears it with the dress.  I don't know if I'll ever know, 'cause I've noticed that woman has so many different outfits I don't think I've ever seen her wear the same thing twice!

The bead:

The dress:

Is that cool, or what!  It took forever to get the shape even and symmetrical, and no, those aren't the same thing. The bead was made with CIM olive, some brown that I haven't identified yet, and dark ivory.  I have no idea who the dress was made by.

After making that bead I thought, "Oh, I like ivory (the whitish color on the bead), I should use it more often," and proceeded to make another couple beads with ivory:

Ivory burns really easily, but it makes a great streaky, curdly effect.  I added a bit of silver wire, which, when melted, results in these little drops of silver on the glass.  It makes a great effect, both on the surface and when you're encasing.  I'll show some encased silver wire tomorrow.  This bead was made with Vetrofond Jupiter Odd Special something-or-other, and dark ivory raked along the equator of the bead, and that's it!  Simple, yet elegant.

I was wondering what would happen if you made raised flowers out of ivory, so this is what came out of that curiosity:

Sorry about the focus, this was my camera phone.

Turns out, the ivory is very soft, so you don't to heat it much to get a good groove with the tungsten pick or whatever tool you're using.  Usually I have to heat the petal dots so much I end up melting the bead below the dots, and pressing too far with the pick.  This bead was made with the dark ivory, green grass transparent, and I think CIM pumpkin for the stamen.

This next bead was meant to be a barrel shape, but it sort of got away from me and ended up being a marble with slightly dimpled bead holes!

This was my piece de resistance!  Raked and curdled dark ivory over violet, ribbed on my ribbed marver, encased in transparent purple, and premium dark purple bookending the whole thing.  My boss took one look at that this morning and claimed it for herself.  And then in the afternoon she asked for matching earrings, which are sitting in the kiln right now.

So, my daughter's in love with Kipper the Dog, a British cartoon for kids.  Emma also loves my beads, so I thought I could combine the two and attempt to make beads of the characters.  I started with the baby pig, Arnold.  Emma won't notice how wonky his eyes are, and I can always make more!

Isn't he adorable?  No?  Kinda freaky looking?  Yeah, I think so too!


Oh, and I even organized my stringer:

Paralyzed by indecision...

I haven't been very prolific at the torch and therefore at the blog the last few days because I can't decide what to make. I watch lampwork tutorial videos and read Lampwork, Etc. And I think, "That looks neat! I wanna give that technique a try!" Then when I get to the torch, all those cool ideas flush out of my head like a huge idea toilet and all I'm left with is a swirling vortex of chaos and indecision. I just wanna make nice, wearable beads, but when I melt the glass I'm getting uneven, badly colored crap that looks like my "first beads" all over again. I'm a much better lampworker than what is coming out of the kiln, but it doesn't matter if all I make is crap, and this all because I can't bring myself to decide on what to make!

I need a plan. A curriculum.

So, starting tomorrow, I will plan, follow, and, in my blog, document a curriculum for learning how to make marketable lampwork beads.

Step 1, get a good night's rest. Good night!

The best part of waking up...

Or of going to bed in this case...

Dinner with my favorite peeps...

Another beautiful day in paradise. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

Speaking of resting...

OMG, I'm so tired.  Forty year olds should NOT burn the candle at both ends for 7 days straight.  I'm going to bed, you all have fun without me! :)

And on the seventh day, she rested... or not.

So excited, yesterday I got my Zoozii's lentil shaper that I bought in the Lampwork Etc. garage sale, and tried it today for the first time.  Obviously, pics or it didn't happen, so pics will be forthcoming when they come out of the annealer tomorrow.  I made 4 valentine's big-hole-beads for my office-mate to give to his fiance, and a few regular beads for me.

Here's the aforementioned lentil shaper. The advert said they were small lentils, and they weren't kidding! That seller is lucky I prefer things smaller to things larger. *evil grin*

You can probably see the frit in the back, I got that as a freebie in one of the shipments I received recently.  Aren't glass people nice!

So, that's all for today, except for the burn I got on my finger.  Yup, I actually stuck the tip of my right index finger straight into the flame.  It was all white and kinda scary looking, but it didn't hurt, and I didn't do anything to triage it. I was in the middle of a bead so I just kept on going!  I'm sure lots of beadmakers have similar stories.  Oddly, I don't have any pics to show because by the time I was done making beads, the burn had disappeared and now the tip of my finger looks just as it did before.

TTFN!

Girl's night in...

Hubby helped me strip some of our bookshelves yesterday and put the books in the storage closet so I could use a couple shelves for glass paraphernalia. I have my beads in cigar boxes, my stash of seed beads and all manner of other stuff, and my bead books like Passing the Flame and Beads of Glass. It is SOOOOO nice having a home for all that stuff instead of having to move it from my workbench to the top of the printer to my chair to the dining room table or back again every time I want to torch or print or use the computer or eat.

Saturday night is my husband's D&D night so Emma and I have the place to ourselves. Emma kept herself mostly busy watching Angelina Ballerina andKipper the Dog while I sorted my new batch of Swarovski crystals. When that was done, we sat down together and watched Bramwell while I cleaned and labeled yesterday's batch of red tests. I was pleasantly surprised by how well behaved Emma was. I didn't want to ignore her to go torch, though. That could have ended in disaster!

So, overall I had a productuve day, even though I didn't get to torch, but I did get to spend the day with my daughter, chatting, playing, laughing and snuggling, between my odd jobs around the studio. And I even got to relax, until she woke up at midnight (in the middle of my writing my blog post, no less) asking for some juice, then proceeded to sick up all over the place! Ah, the joys of having a toddler.

Emma is fine, but I'm exhausted and woke up with a headache. Hubby is home now, so I'm gonna go back to sleep even though it's 9:30 in the morning. Ironically, this is usually whay happens evey weekend. One good day and one bad day. One of these days I would like to have two good days in a row, when I don't "lie and bed and think of things that could have been."

So, to bed I go. Adieu, to you and you and you!

Put your money where your mouth is!

Don't you hate it when you're so broke you can't afford to buy a product to support either handcrafters like myself or big companies that follow business plans you agree with? You want to give a little something to show you care, or agree, but when it comes down to it, the groceries and electric bill are a little more pressing than that string of delicious looking beads from your favorite beadmaker or the brand new all-electric vehicle that just hit the roads.

One of the things I'm gonna do with this blog is point out which handcrafters, companies, and products I like and why. Yeah, that's sort of self-evident, given this is my blog, but I want to make a special effort to do this because: a) I'm gonna run out of stuff to talk about eventually if all I'm talking about are beads and b) since I can't afford to buy them, maybe giving them a little bloggy love will show my support. And if you, my loyal reader, follow the links and spread the word, you too will be spreading the bloggy love.  And isn't that the best way to make someone happy?

So, the first handcrafter I want to talk about in my Bloggy Love series is Laura Sparling. She's a fabulous beadmaker in England who has the quirkiest sense of humor I could possibly love. Yeah, that sense of humor might be just a standard British quirk but, being the Anglophile that I am, it tickles all sorts of funny bones in me.  And, Laura’s beads are gorgeous! If I had a million dollars, I'd buy her beads.

I discovered Laura and her beads through her YouTube video tutorials on how to do a handful of different lampworking techniques. She has very informative, well explained (and produced) videos on pulling stringer, encasing, applying stringer, adding and encasing silver wire, and striking Creation is Messy's gorgeous candy apple red, Sangre.  So, to date, she only has 5 videos, but they're all lovely, and she has great advice... (except with the Striking Sangre one. Nothing I do will get my Sangre to strike like hers does, but I blame myself 'cause I'm not cool and English like she is. Seriously, I think the glass is reacting almost as much to her voice as it is to the heat of the flame.)

Laura is not only talented as a comedienne and YouTube personality (whether unintentionally or no is irrelevant), she is a marvelous beadmaker. Her gallery will show you that her beads are both technically perfect, with adorable little bead hole puckers, even sizes, and smooth roundness, but also beautifully designed, with rich, varied color combinations and excellent taste in decoration. I envy her stringer control and play her videos while I'm torching to help with my own beadmaking. I could be so lucky to get half as good at lampworking as Laura is.

Oh, look, almost midnight and I'm about to turn into a pumpkin. So, good night, I'll most likely kill you in the morning.

Too tired to make beads...

Emma wouldn't go to sleep early enough for me to make beads tonight, and after the last two night's going to bed after midnight, I just couldn't safely make beads tonight. Imagine that, "La la la, I'm making beads. Oops! Nodded off there for a moment and slipped my finger into the flame."

But! I have beads to show from yesterday's bead making debauchery.  

Happy Valentine's Day!
Here's a nice bouquet of red and pink polka-dot beads for you to smell.
Oh, sorry, didn't mean to get that mandrel up your nose there! 

Since this post is so short, I offer you a picture of an adorable baby girl as recompense.

Whee!  I'm gonna be a crazy-haired German physicist someday!

So, good night and good luck! Or, see you tomorrow. *shrug* One of those two.

Here comes the sun... in six short hours!

I spent the last few hours running color tests of my reds (or at least as many as I had prepared mandrels for).  That makes 17 beads in one evening.  I think it's *almost* a record for me.  Reason I ran these color tests is that I made a few beads last night with a glass that looked the perfect shade of valentine-heart red, and when it came out of the kiln it was distinctly brown.  Now, I'm not going to worry about whether or not I had the right torch chemistry or kiln environment for this glass, or if I should have melted it slower or faster.  I just want to find the right color so I can make some beads for a friend to give to his fiance next week, and I don't have time to muck about with experiments.  At least, not those kinds of experiments.  I mean, seriously, I have about 30 different colors of red. I might as well take advantage of that and MAKE 30 different beads.  If he doesn't like them, then I can use them in a neat "shades of red" set.

My workbench with all the carnage of red glass.  I'm not a neat freak, I swear.  I just cleaned up so I could find all the red.

As promised, the meat of today's post is about the cigar boxes.  It's good to have a handy person around for these, and a power tool or two, but if not you can always cheat somehow.

My grandfather used to smoke cigars, and while the smell of the cigar boxes brings back all sorts of mental images of him from my childhood, mostly the smell just gives me a sense of well-being as if I've come home.  It's so amazing how our sense of smell works.  But, that's a topic for a totally different blog!

I present to you, the cigar boxes.

The handy part comes in when you open the boxes up.  My husband cut two strips of cedar to the right length to fit inside the box and then cut grooves halfway into one edge of each strip spaced the height of the inside of the cigar box.  When you lay the strips into the cigar boxes and shove them to the sides, you can set bead-laden mandrels into those grooves, and those beads-on-mandrels will always fit, because you can't put over-sized beads into the box and close the lid.

I haven't done it yet, but I'm going to attach a piece of ribbon connecting the lid to the box so that it will just sit with the lid open, like you see here, but without the other cigar boxes holding the lid up.

This is what I used to use to store my beads. I'm still using them for my spacers.  It's a nightmare getting the beads out, and there just aren't enough spaces for all the different colors of spacer beads I want to have on hand.  You can see my most recent batch of spacer beads in the bottom left corner, just waiting for me to buy another spacer bead box like this one.

...

I forgot how much I like listening to the radio while I'm making beads.  Tonight I set Pandora to the default Rock station and sang out loud to almost every song.  Oddly enough, there was a HUGE run of Beatles, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr songs all in a row, and then interspersed with the rest of the songs, to an over 50/50 ratio.  Like now.  Paul McCartney, Live at New York City, singing "Blackbird."

Is that me?  The blackbird singing in the dead of night?  Sure feels like it, it's after midnight and I'm still writing.

Good night, I bid you Peace.

Low-tech for the win!

I hate cleaning my beads.  I hate removing the beads from the mandrels.  I hate getting the Dremel out.  I hate grinding away at the bead release in the bead holes for what feels like hours on end, the vibration of the Dremel numbing my fingers into insensibility (redundant much?).  Sometimes, the diamond bit even chips the glass at the bead hole, and that really pisses me off.  Someone once suggested that my beads chip because I'm cleaning them before they're annealed, so now that I have the kiln I thought, "Great!  No more cracking beads!  No more chipped holes!  My problems are over!"

Guess what.  Didn't work.  The worst chipping ever was after I annealed the bead.  I'm so sad about it, I didn't even take a picture to show you.  Just imagine a cute light green big-hole bead with brown-red dots and the bead hole with radial chips taken out of it.  Reminds me of the chips taken out of the edges of arrowheads my archaeologist uncle used to show me.  Difference between the arrowheads and my bead is, the arrowheads are supposed to be sharp, my bead hole is not.

So, I'm putting some of my newest beads away tonight and I noticed that I still haven't cleaned them.  Probably just a Freudian mistake, right?  Not wanting to pull out the damned Dremel, I suddenly remembered another option.  Last year when I was out shopping for cigar boxes to store my beads (more on that later, probably the next post now that I think about it) I found a packet of really pokey pipe cleaners.  I remembered then that a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, before I'd heard people extol the virtues of Dremels and diamond bits for cleaning beads, I used pipe cleaners.  But!  The pipe cleaners I used to use were wimpy, soft pipe cleaners and worked for naught.  These new-fangled pipe cleaners were hefty, had pokey needles sticking out of them, and were $2.50 per hundred.  I plunked down my milk money and stuffed the pipe cleaners in my bag... sadly, never to be seen or heard from again... until today.

So, to make a long story short, I found the pipe cleaners, cleaned some beads, and this is what came of it.  If you can't tell from the pictures how awesomely clean the beads are, you'll just have to trust me.  The flash seems to reflect a great deal on the inside surface of the bead hole, greatly diminishing the magnificent clarity of the holes.

Same bead.  Left one has bead release - right one does not.   Yeah, not much to see here.

Now, these little gems might be better...

Yup, a little better.  You can almost see through the bead hole edge-on.

And here are my saviors!

BJLong Pipe Cleaners.  I know it says "80", but really it has a hundred in it.

Oh, and by the way, I burnt myself in an unmentionable place this evening while torching.  A shard of almost-molten glass popped off the rod and landed right in my cleavage.  *YOWCH*  Not wanting to drop the bead I was working on, I asked my husband to dig it out but he couldn't find it.  After it stopped burning, my skin still kept getting irritated but I couldn't tell why until my torching session was over.  Turns out the piece of glass MELTED the inside edge of the piping on my low neckline and the glass was stuck there, scratching me that whole time.  Looks like a rash.  I wear low necklines all the time ('cause it's so freaking hot here!) so I wonder if anyone will notice.  I bet I'll have people staring at my cleavage all day tomorrow.  Well, that'll be a change.  Whoohoo!

Come back tomorrow for another harrowing adventure with Lyssa in "The Gathering Flame"!

Coming home...

After neglecting my blog for many weeks I am coming back to stay. Not every post will be pithy and insightful. Not every post will have pictures. Nor will every post be grammatically correct, 'cause, hey, even I'm not perfect.

Most of the posts will be coming from my phone, so hopefully what pictures there are will be half-decent. Someone please complain in the comments if the pictures are crap so I can fix it.

The latest news is the long-awaited, long-anticipated arrival of the kiln.  It is a beaut! And once you decipher the heiroglyphical instructions it is even easy to use. I have run (I think) five batches of beads, all but one being concurrent with making beads.

The one "batch anneal" did result in some etched CIM Peace, which is a disappointment, but I will just havve to experiment with annealing times and temps. I will be a pro at programming the kiln in no time!

Here is the obligatory photo of the day. I made this set of beads for my boss for Christmas. I was her Sectret Santa. How lucky was she?! LOL