Trip to the USA

It’s official. I will be traveling to the USA in OCT. I know we will be going to California, most likely staying in Los Angeles. Am 99% sure I’ll be there on the 10th & 11th of OCT and attending BlizzCon in Anaheim. At this stage, I’m not sure yet what other days we will be there, or for how long, but I’m pretty sure we will get to do lots of fun touristy things while we are there. That’s all I know for now,… and I am very excited. Whooooooohooooo! and nervous at the same time,lol.

Bead loop dangle lesson

I have recently added the first free lesson to the Beginner Lessons section of the website. Check it out here Bead loop dangle.

I will be doing ear wires next.

Beginner Lessons

I have recently added a new section to the website. This section will contain free jewelry making lessons for beginners. These beginner lessons will all be free, and viewable on site, not via downloadable files. I will be adding new content to this section at every chance I get, however as nice as it would be to have these lessons available for you now, unfortunately I’m very low on time and there is not much I can do about it, so getting these lessons done and uploaded to the website will take a little longer than I would like. I’ll get there though.

Drop by and have a look at the Beginner Lessons section. Please comment and let me know what you think, or suggest some more lessons that would be useful for beginners.

My mother’s pendant

Here is a closeup of her Birthday pendant.

Birthday present for my mother

Here are the little gifts I made for my mother the other day. Happy Birthday Mum!
The pendant is a woven sculture pendant with a large faceted ruby, smaller ruby beads, a garnet bead and swarovski crystals. It is GF wire and is 1.5″ from top of bail to bottom of pendant and 1″ wide. She loves it! Phew!
I also made her this pair of earrings, not matching the pendant though, because I have previously made her a nice pair of garnet & GF earrings that will go very well with the pendant. I love this design of earrings,. it’s a simple/neat design but very stunning IMO. This earring design is something that I would love to wear myself. I am not sure who thought up this design, so if you know who it was, please make a comment and let me know and I will add the designer’s name to this post.

New Rings

It’s been a little while since I’ve had a chance to play with wire,..it’s not that I haven’t wanted to,..it’s simply because other things (like being a mother to three) have taken up all my time. However,. last week.. I decided to organise myself and my messy workbench and I pulled out my pliers and had a blast making these rings.

I’ll post some more pics of these up tomorrow.

Meet ‘Lucky’.

‘Lucky’ crawled out from under the bonet of our car after we travelled 100k. He was a little shabby from the experience and had a couple of little burn marks on his head. He came from the Queensland Hinterlands, but as he was in need of care, we were also not in an area suitable for his release anyway, and because we were continuing our travel home the next morning we decided to buy a travel tank, some crickets and nurse him back to health. We also got advice from wildlife who advise us NOT to release him in an area where he was foreign to. So by default… we had a new pet. We have had him since 2004 and I have to say,… he is very cute. More about him later.

It’s been a while….

It’s been a while since I last posted. I’ve been very busy as usual (being a mother and partner) and I’ve not had much time spare to play with wire or fire :},.. whenever I’ve had a small chunk of time… it’s usually very late at night and I fear that if I were to play with wire or fire that late at night, I’d most likely poke an eye out or burn my head in the flame as I nod off.

Recently however,. things have calmed down here somewhat and I’ve been able to get back into the swing of things. I made a dangle bracelet for my son to give to a friend for her 15th birthday (forgot to snap a photo and only remembered after it was wrapped). I haven’t played with my Bobcat torch again yet… but I visit it now and then up in the studio and fondle the glass rods a bit,lol.

I can’t wait to get back to playing with hot gooey glass on a rod again. I need to find myself an affordable annealing kiln first, because I cannot help myself,.. I just have to make those big fancy beads (I’m a wannabe fancy lampwork bead maker hee hee) and they will just crack in half if I don’t anneal them in a kiln. So,.. I’m looking for a kiln,..but not looking too hard…these things are expensive and I don’t really want to find a kiln that I might love,..and I cannot not get it,. and it will cost me and arm and a leg.

In the mean time,… most of my free time is spent upgrading (read re-coding) my website. Ok,..I feel the perfectionism has crept in and is holding me hostage in XHTML and CSS code, validating it and removing errors. Oh but wait… what’s this for a change,… I have upgraded and made some changes to this blog today and aaaaaaar it’s PHP. So anyway,.. I’m still working on the first three pages I started a week ago,lol but am almost done with the home page. It’s looking good,..(and I mean the code is looking good) and working well in several browsers. The other two pages that I have started on already,.still have a tonne of recoding and validating to do, and look a little untidy in the browsers as the links and texts have lost their uniformity etc and I have to go back into those pages once the conversions a complete and fix up that uniformity again. I have a long way to go, to convert the rest of the website from HTML to XHTML and CSS, but I think just knowing what I do now,.. the rest of the pages will be easier and quicker.

A quest for fresh coffee.

Perfectionism is a trait I have and is most often my downfall,.. as those who also have this trait will understand,..it can, and does very often work against you. However,.. this trait has led me to develop a strong desire to be able to make myself the perfect coffee at home, consistantly,.with only the flavours of the beans and different blends giving a varied taste and interesting appeal.

I used to drinking instant coffee at home blerrrk!,.and at the same time became more and more dissatisfied with the coffee I was having when out and about, so developed my thoughts and desires of being able to make the perfect coffee at home.

So,.. with perfectionism taking hold,.. the persuit for the perfect coffee at home came at a price and I now have an espresso machine, a grinder to ‘grind on demand’ just enough for the cup/s,.. 10k+ of green beans (they last for over a year in this state when stored correctly) and a little home roaster. I’m currently making another roaster so I can roast larger than 100g at a time. I also have a tonne of other coffee making paraphernalia and a dedicated coffee cupboard phrrrt.

I now pour the perfect coffee at home,.way better and fresher than I have ever tasted in any cafe,.. but as tempting as it might be to try out my latest roasts/blends all day long,. I stick to two coffees in the morning,. and usually one or two in the afternoon/evening. So just because I have gone so far as to roast my own green coffee beans and ‘grind on demand’ to obtain the freshest possible coffee,..I’m not a coffee guzzler by any means,. I just desire ultra fresh coffee when I do have it.

I will talk more about my coffee obsession and discoveries and maybe you might be converted too,lol.

A new look blog

As you can see, things are looking a little different here,.. and very messy and erm.. just wrong ;). I’m playing with things right now and my blog will look a little disjointed with odd looking for a while with strange looking links/titles/categories and so on. I’ve also upgraded wordpress to the latest version but in the process, I can see that a few posts have gone strange with the entire post becoming a link etc…. and I’m sure there will be more anomalies found as I get into it more.

I hope to have everything all configured nicely transformed in a few days time…. but it could take a little longer,.. having done this before with wordpress… it’s fiddly and time consuming.

Hope you will like the new look and more regular updates,…. I’ve been busy over the past 12months,.. but I hope to have time this year to blog a bit.

Wow,.how time flies.

It’s been a while since my last post,. and when I really looked at it,..I was amazed to see just how long,.. scary!!!

I’ve had to put a few of my loves on hold, while I concentrate all my efforts into caring for my loves at home. Mothers (and fathers) I’m sure can relate to times during their child rearing years when there never seems to be enough time to ‘do it all’.  

Personal interests and activities we once enjoyed and had abundent time for tend to get squished and pushed aside,. then slip right down the bottom of the pile, and you’re too tired to do them anyway if you ever got a reasonable sized chunk of time to partake.

For several years I tried to ‘do it all’,..grabbing a few minutes here and there between loads of washing and running the kids around in the car,..to do a bit more on that bracelet, or make one bead etc,.but it was frustrating beyond belief trying to do these things in minute parcels of time.

I faced a constant stuggle with this,. and even desperately wished that I was a normal mother, who was content to rear her children and not have any other time demanding interests.  I really wished I was born without a creative bone in my body (most of the people I know around me are like that and they are perfectly happy), and that I never had the urge to be creative again. Getting the sudden urge to whip up some nice lampwork beads based on the jacket one of the kid’s teacher’s was wearing, but know it will never happen because you wont get a chance to do it any time soon in the next month or three.  Or the sudden urge to try and capture in watercolour the streams of rain coming out of those amazing sun lit clouds that I pointed out to the kids on the way home from school because it seemed to me to be a fantastic challenge to paint something that in its natural state, looked so unnatural and as I explained to the kids, that even if I were to paint that exactly like it was,.my painting would look wrong because the subject looked wrong and like they were painted badly in the sky.

I decided to stop fighting it and accept that there are just times in ones life when we have to put other things aside for a while, and pick them up again when time allows. So having done that,. I was able to remove the frustration of always looking but never quite finding that minute to spare to do something arty in piece meal chunks. Creativity was sadly stifled anyway,. it’s not like a tap you can just turn on because you have five minutes spare between chores,. then switch off because the kids are grumpy and wanting to be fed again *gasp*.

So, the kids have taken all of me, over the past year pretty much and they have all benefitted from having a very attentive mother,. and I admit it has been nice concentrating fully on them for that time. I did promise myself however, that when they start back at school this year,.. I will try again to ‘do it all’,..well at least let a little creativity back in . 

If all goes to plan,. I hope to write a few more tutes this year,..and hopefully begin one within the next week or two. I plan to fire up the Bobcat torch and play with glass again soon too,.. and I have a nagging urge to dribble some paint onto some watercolour paper. Nothing special,..just wanna mess around and play.

But slowly does it,.. one thing at a time,..I don’t want to go back to how things were.

Just want to say hi to everyone and hope you’re all happy and well.

Cheers,

Remy

Clear Encasing & Silver

I decided to try a Cosmic Swirl bead.  It had several challenging ‘firsts’ for me and if the design turned out well,. to top it off I could attempt to encase it with clear,. hopefully without any carbon scum coating. *crossing fingers*

A first time using silver leaf in my studio, that was kinda cool. The first time stacking dots in such a way and combining colours like this.  The design did turn out beautifully and then I was faced with the scary decision to encase (having never done it successfully before on a bead so large) and possibly ruin a perfectly good bead. Oh what the heck,..it’s only glass right?,lol.

Well the encasing went like a dream,.. I am so thrilled with it,..took forever though, and I think this bead took me about 35mins to make,lol. It is about 1″ in size.

It survived the vermiculite without cracking,.albeit suffering a few pock marks on the surface from putting it in too early *note to self,..bigger beads need a second or two longer to firm up the skin before putting in the vermiculite,…. I was able to snap this photo and two hours later I took my bead out of my purse to show a friend and heard a ‘tink’ sound and felt between my fingers a little explosive energy ;}…..Awesome!,. now I have two cabochons,lol

As luck would have it,. it broke in the best possible way,. with both sides showing off main features beautifully.  I need to keep these as they are for a while because they look really awesome like this and I can see their gizzards. Once I am ‘over it’ perhaps after a few more cracks (which I’ll avoid once I’m able to pop beads straight from torch to kiln), I’m thinking I might just slump these and turn them into real cabochons (without mandrel holes). I think they would look fantastic wrapped in Sterling Silver.

Intense Black and a fun shape

Today I decided to play with ‘intense black’. This stuff is awesome,. and I bought a heap of it because I love the lacey webbing effect it has. Made all five beads in one session at the torch because I was on a roll

Usually 3 beads at a time is my limit because I find lampworking very tiring,.. I seem to get mezmerized or something by the flame and my eyes get very heavy(the same way they do whenever I try to read anything),…don’t want to nod off and burn my nose.

Anyway,.. have a look at the webbing on the top area of the 4th bead along. This is a good example of what intense black does.

I also really played with the torch during these,.altering the amounts of NG and Oxygen to acheive colour reations where I wanted them. An example is the middle bead where the turquoise and red is at the top. The turquoise/red section is actually one turquoise rod,. only part of it was hit with a reducing flame to cause the copper to come to the surface.

Too much fun was had in one evening me thinks :).

Clear Encasing & Florals

Ok,. today was another attempt to encase in clear without cooking the clear and turning it into a carbon filled grey scum layer over the beads.

The first bead was a warmup bead,lol. It is an implosion bead. This bead went through a process of almost turning itself inside-out to get the look of this flower. Love doing these.

The second bead is actually my second attempt at a plunged dot floral. Both of these beads are 16mm and the clear stayed nice and clear. No carbon scum here yaaay!

The orange petal floral was my first attempt at a plunged dot floral. I have not read any instructions how to do these yet and did these the way I thought they were made. This bead is a whopper at 1″ and covered in a carbon scum from letting the clear heat up too much. Oh well,lol.  The white petalled bead is my third attempt at a plunged dot floral and is supposed to be slightly pinkish since the white petals were covered in transparent amethyst. Unfortunately this bead also suffered a roasting,lol and is also covered in a carbon scum layer. The petals looks rather grey in real like *snif*. 

Soooooh it seems that I can avoid cooking the clear when doing small beads,.. but large beads I just cook ‘em. It seems my options are,.. melt mid-flame and get carbon scum,.. melt high in flame and die of old age while waiting for the glass to form it’s nice round shape.  I think I will try again after reading some instructions first, and try and figure out the clear trick.  Clear and I,… we just don’t get along :} .

Week - 06

I have made a few beads this week and have put them up in my journal (Lampwork Journey section)  but I really cannot make any jewellery from my beads yet (unless they are for myself or my children) because they’re not annealed.  I don’t have a kiln yet and haven’t arranged to have any of my beads ‘batch’ annealed by someone else because I don’t really have enough at this point.

Anyway,.this little pendant is for my  9yr old daughter.  She loves the little Koalas that I make, so I thought I’d put one of these little guys on one of my beads,.. if it cracks,.. I just redo.