Tuesday, June 28, 2011

An Interesting Phenomenon

Yesterday, I spent several hours at the torch.  I mixed colors, pulled twisties, played with color combos and made what seemed like a lot of beads.  When they came out of the kiln I showed my husband.


 "Honey ~ look at all the beads I made today!"

Then I took them off the mandrels.  32 spacers, 21 beads and 2 pendants (not counting the focal that's still stuck on the mandrel.

You know what happened?

It no longer looked like several hours worth of work.


It's a good thing I'm doing this for love instead of money!

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Coolest Thing Ever!!

Yesterday I was torching (Yay!!)  and I decided I wanted to make a rainbow colored twistie.  I'm not sure what the accepted way to do this is, so I set about figuring it out myself.  I started with a paddle of clear, striped on the colors, and covered the whole thing with clear. I'm using CIM clear at the moment. I took a picture because I thought it looked kind of cool.

This is the paddle, striped and encased.  I usually encase going around from one side to the other, but in this case I was afraid the whole blob would melt off the clear rod if I did it that way, so I striped on the clear.

I got this hot, grabbed the end with tweezers and started pulling the twistie.  Then I decided that since I had a begining picture, I may as well have a pulling picture.  Obviously, with both hands full, I needed help.  So I called to my 12 year old (who by the way is a real shutterbug!) and asked her to come in and snap the pic for me.  Feel free to ignore the mess in the background!


Here are the finished twisties.



While she's snapping pictures my daughter says "Hey Mom, that blob at the end looks like a heart!"  Huh.  It kind of did.  But I'm pulling twisties, so I make several more.  Then I decide to see if I actually could make a heart out of the blob.  I held the blob with tweezers, used the atached clear rod to make a bail and popped it in the kiln.

Then I made a bead with the twistie, just to see if it worked.

Not quite what I was going for. It looks as though some of the colors didn't make it into the pull.  Nothing to write home about, but it's okay.

 
Do you want to see what I pulled out of the kiln?  The coolest thing EVER! And it's the first bail I've made using this method that actually worked! I am sooo going to try to do this again!






                                                      Thank you for the inspiration Jill!!

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Back to Work

Ah the poor neglected blog.

So here's what I've been up to the last several months in 50 words or less:

Got a real job.  Had fun.  Met great people. Stressed out.  Cried.  Stressed out some more.  Quit real job.  Regained personal life. Realized if I put the same energy into my own business it would be successful.  Fell in love with lampworking again. 

Whew!  Hope I never have to run through that cycle again! 

So what's next? 
Back to the torch full time, but with a new appreciation for what I will now consider my "Real Job"!

P.S.  I'm walking in the Anacortes Relay for Life this weekend.  Check out my Etsy shop to read my personal story and see how you can support this great cause.