Fascinating flat laps..... yeah!!!

Chameleon top on jam spoon

Well, Happy New Year and a great 2012 to all!

Sorry I have been off the radar, in between christmas, kids holidays and a massive volume of glassy orders I have been too busy to pop up even a quickie blog entry.... doh!
I have been honey dippering and now Jam spooning a LOT to fill some local and international orders.  Here's one of my recent Jam spoons with a cute but cartoony little bloke on the top.  The slightly difficult thing with these jam spoons is making the bowl a nice shape and my VERY clever husband made me a spoon press a little while ago.  It is basically an el-cheapo pair of tweezers with two el-cheapo teaspoons on the end in position to cup each other and therefore press the glass into a bowl after squeezing into a flat paddle on the end first.  Easy peasy, although I am going to get myself a couple of steeper more deeply bowled spoons to make a deeper dish on my glass one... more things for the drawing board!

The other thing I am glass to say that I got for christmas is a cheapish but cheer flat lap with machine.  It is one of the Inland swap tops and I absolutely love it.  All of my paperweights have flat and shiny bottoms now and I have started a few lapping experiments as a basic entry into some simple coldworking.  I decided last night that I would make something to lap and rather than go with the "window" style commonly seen with the fish or garden scenes encased in clear then layers of opaque and frit and enamels and stuff around the outside that gives the impression of a thunder egg sort of thing.

I only had 10 minutes or go and reprogram the kiln (it was also 11pm so I was keen to get to bed) so I just make a simple barrel bead using lots of thin coat layers so that the layers would show as stripes when ground back.  Here is the starting bead.... not fancy, but something to practice on:

Simple layered barrel bead

Then I lapped the ends a little, the two large sides and put a bit of a facet on each edge which I think made it look a little classier..... although it took a bit of practice to get these facets straight and even!

Lapped barrel bead after polishing

It feels lovely and smooth in your hand and I keep running my fingers over the soapy feel of it.  I am quite happy with the shape and I think I did a much better job of the polishing than I had done before (thank goodness that was only on the bases of the paperweights and therefore doesn't matter).

I have installed this one on a simple beadable pendant bar with a bali silver bead as a spacer to take up the tiny bit of slack on the bar..... I am really happy with it and are already thinking of more complicated things I can do.... using stacked murrini canes and stuff.......oh  yeah!!!!!!

Chained up on Maille.... all in glass

I know... I know.... I have ten million other things I should be doing right now.  I should be getting some stock for the local shop, making murrini for Affordable and packing to go to the glass studio for Loren Stumps classes, but nope..... none of the above!

I am feeling guilty and a bit naughty too, but I have had an idea perculating about in my head for quite a long time and decided to try it out..... Glass links Chain Maille.  I aware it has been done before (a lady by the name of Kim Edwards http://www.lonetreestudio.com/chainmail.html does some absolutely bogsmacking work in this style) but I wanted to try out some byzantine chain rather than my usual dongle-y ones.  Here it is... it worked quite well and was made in boro (because I am too much of a lazy slug to try this in gorgeous italian soft glass).  I just used 3mm glass stringers to make the links.... some closed and some open that I close in the flame after putting the pattern together.  It was fun, but fiddly as buggery as you can imagine.  I don't think this will be a common thing for me to work on to be honest, but at least I can know I tried it.... its all about the fun.

 On a slightly dissapointing front, my kiln has been playing up quite a bit over the last few days and after trolling about online and finally downloading the manual for the controller I have discovered the thermocouple thingo is stuffed....... aarrrgh!  I am really hopeful my extremely handy and helpful husband Leo can wave a magic wand and fix it up, or worse case go to the electronic shop and buy a bit of wire or something to sort it out, but we will have to see.  Lucky I have my new kiln to collect in about a month......YAHOO!

I have been playing about a LOT with my bead soup.  It is so gorgeous that I don't want to bugger it up and are probably trying to get a little too fancy rather than think about the form of the thing...... I am going to zen out, watch bridesmaids (the movie) and see what comes of some random beading then.....  Nat :-)

Experimenting with japanese print inspired style

First off, it has to be said..... no I did not do a class with Anastasia recently (or ever), but I suppose there is only so many looks you get with enamels on a base bead and some stringers thrown on!

Well, I have a burning need to make some beads lately, both for monetary reasons and for creative satisfaction.  I have been playing just a little with some enamels and these top two are the results of that playing.  I made them both on a base of devardi glass and used some thompson 104 enamels in two different tones just laid beside each other to give me a sort of interesting base.  It has to be said also that once the enamel is melted in, it felt like it gives a nice surface for some stringer work to me (now that was a pleasant surprise).  I have been working on a series of japanese print inspired beads and wanted something reminiscent of cherry blossom branch pattern.  They don't look japanese I am sure, but the effect was nonetheless quite nice and I was happy with the colour and form of these.  I really think that next time I need to use some of the gorgeous reichenbach porcelain white for the blossoms to give the really dense bright white and allow for really fine tiny dots too.... shall add that to my cart with Affordable for sure :-)

After these cherry blossom brances I tried something a little more strange again..... some bamboo stringer work..... I REALLY don't like how this came out, but I do admit that if I used a base of white and just kept the bamboo a little simpler and took a little more time to make the bamboo finer it still has some possibilities.

Now this third one I made whilst thinking more about Japanese prints and was a very quick and dirty job (please excuse the bad pic too).  I decided I wanted a cherry blossom effect which I was quite dissapointed with as it bled quite a bit (shouldn't have used that intense black now should I) and the blossom dots were clunky and I didn't take much time with the shaping, but hopefully you can see where I was headed.  I wanted it to look like a japanese print on a wall!  I also masked off a branch shape at the top and the centre feature area, then etched this fella.... Definitely needs to be sorted out but once again its a start.

This was one of those days when nothing turned out how I wanted it to turn out, and yet was not a complete dissapointment either.  I have loads of ideas for some new directions to try out now and that sort of inspiration is always welcome!

Blast from the past.... using some VERY early murrini

I cannot blame the lovely Mr Loren Stump COMPLETELY for my murrini obsession, although he does bear a great measure of responsibility for the improvement in them thats for sure.  Every once in a while I go through my murrini stash and come across some of the early first ones.... usually this makes me scrunch up with some shame and think that I should hide them somewhere they can't be seen by the general public, but not yesterday.

I often participate in the monthly bead challenge run by the gorgeous Jan Cahill (http://www.jancbeads.net/ ) on our local glass bead makers forum here in Australia (http://www.glassbeadmakers.net/forum/index.php ) and this months challenge is Fantasy!

I had made up my half of a dragonfly cane,was quite happy with that and was in the mood to try a bead or two for the challenge.  I decided that if I cut some thin slices of the dragonfly wing components off the dodgy end of the pull they might make a cool fairies wing (possibly cooler if they didn't have black outlines).  So I threw a couple in the kiln and made a bead.

The process I use when just sort of playing with this type of bead is a bit .....er.... painful you could say.  Because I sort of want it to grow as I go along there is no pre-planning (apart from the wing component) and I end up scrambling around looking for bits and pieces with a hot bead waving around like a mad woman.  I decided that I would try some enamel on the bottom of a fairy simple tab bead which once I had made that base decided I wanted some simple murrini flowers on there....... MAD crazy-arsed dash to the box of floral murrini to find the old simple ones I made a couple of years ago.  Once I got them onto the bead I decided I wanted a full fairy and now needed some ivory stringer... juggling of the mandrel and the rod in the same hand ensued.... once done I wanted a component cane in purple for the dress.... more juggling and swearing... I am sure you get the picture!

When I put legs and arms and a body with a dress onto the bead, I realised this fairy needs a face of a certain size.... Going through my randoms box of murrini in one hand whilst try to keep the bead warm in the other must have looked odd, but finally I did find a bag of small faces (from a time when I pulled everything too small).  The very FIRST face cane I had ever made, complete with non-matching sized eyes and a too small mouth.... I had got to the point where I no longer cared which face, just any face will do so I grabbed one of the murrini I NEVER use and usually hide.  Surprisingly the size was just right and once I had thrown on a shock of hair she looked quite good.  I popped on one of the dragonfly wing slices and sort of wrapped it around the bead, because it was really too big, but I was really over the drama by now and just wanted to finish up I went ahead.  I also decided that since this bead was going to look really bad anyway I might as well try out a small slice of the 2011 signature cane and see how well it applies next to my signature monkey face..... quite well as it turns out!

Here's the results.   I think this bead is an example of two wrongs can actually turn out ok.... not perfect, but definitely OK!!  She is rough there is no doubt about it, but it is a good start for some new ideas.... one of which means I really do need to pull the wing cane bodgy end down a bit smaller!

House move from hell, still unpacking......aaarrgh

I have missed the boat to do more torching in the cool weather I think, but here is a particularly unflattering pic of me in the middle of my messy boghole of a lampworking desk just before the packing up began......................... artistic temperament = organised mess (at least that is what I told myself)

Yep the house move from hell is over, but the unpacking is feeling a bit like the neverending story or groundhog day..... box after box after box etc. I am sure you who have moved themselves totally understand the pain. We have somehow managed to get most of the house unpacked (apart from small pockets of boxes in corners), but the garage is a real disaster and my lampworking zone is a particularly nasty quagmire of boxes and miscellaneous "stuff". I reckon I either need to lose about 60kg or not fit between the boxes to even reach my glass.... well to be honest the 60kg could come off irrespective of that issue, but we had better not go there :-)

Now that the rain is giving it a short rest here in Western Sydney I thought I might get some of this rubbish out of my space. I am getting increasingly desperate to set up my torches and kiln and melt some glass. My dreams of sorting out the stuff as I unpack and start working in a pristine well organised environment is very quickly being given the bums rush so that I can just get some lampworking done................ If I wouldn't set alight to the cardboard boxes and melt the plastic ones I might already have lit the flame.......... hey, thats one way to sort out the garage ;-)

House move from hell.... where are my beads gone!

Yup, my house is a little bit like a black pit of "stuff". We have been moving house over the last two weeks and now live in a massive pile of unpacked boxes! Moving from a humungous house to a smaller one has come with a large number of trials too......... WHERE ARE MY BEADS is the plaintiff cry heard more than once over the last few days!

My darling hubby Leo has tried to be very cognisant (big word for the day there friends) of the fact that I need a usable & safe space for my lampworking with adequate ventillation and no fire hazards. All this combined with limited space and trying to plan for correct storage of my rather large stash of lampworking glass is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare. I would take a picture of the carnage, but can't find my camera..... yup, packed!

I tried to limit the difficulties by leaving my lampwork setup and beading supplies until the very last, which I thought would be a "brilliant" plan so I could access my stuff quickly at this end...... no dice! I got a rather bad headache on the last moving day and had to leave it my Leo, he has managed to shove my stuff into boxes and plastic containers which are now spread all over the place - totally not his fault, I would rather have my things than leave them behind, but now I am needing some of my beading supplies and are getting rather desperate to melt some glass again I am getting slowly crankier by the day...

....hmmmmm, unpack kitchen stuff so we can have a home cooked dinner, or live off takeaway another day and continue the search for beading supplies................................... BEADING WINS!!!!!!!

Oh, here's one of the last beads off my torch before the move - I call her a Burlesque bead (think goddess with clothes!) This lady has gone to a lovely lampwork friend Trinar ;-)