November 30, 2007 by beadreaming.

I finally got a treasury in Etsy!!!! Yay! What is a treasury? It’s a page where you display your favorite items and for me, are  glass lampwork items…Wanna see my selections? Click on this link! I’ll be rotating them on Friday and Saturday evening so you will see different items when you visit my treasury…but hurry…my favorites will expire on Sunday morning.

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November 27, 2007 by beadreaming.

Oh I hope you had a great Thanksgiving!  My sister was in town so I’ve been busy shopping and didn’t have much time for making beads… well except when I did a little demo for her on how I make beads.  I purchased a Biagi bracelet and a few silver biagi beads for her to choose from and she selected the marine theme (sea shell, sea horse and a tropical fish) so I made the glass beads to match the bracelet.  This was my gift to her for Christmas.  By the way, I’ll be offering biagi bracelets and beads in the near future.  The bracelets are really pretty!

As I was making the beads for a custom order, my brother in law was observing the process and liked the beads so much I chose to give them to him as a gift.  He’s leaving today so I didn’t have time to make other ones…now I have to re-do my custom order, but that’s all right…

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November 18, 2007 by beadreaming.

 I wanted to share something  new… MusiCat…or music kittens when in a group  The inspiration for these beads came from Tom Sawyer’s Musical Adventures play that I attended a couple of weeks ago.  The music and performance inspired this design that includes a keyboard and a musical note.    The hole runs vertically of the left one and vertically on the middle and right one.   The left and right one measure 7/8″ x 1.  The middle one  measures 3/4″ x 1″.  The price is $20 each

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November 16, 2007 by beadreaming.

Last Friday I took a fusing glass class with Carol Fonda and Monty Clark. Overall, the class was fun and informative. Monty showed us how to cut the glass and assemble the pieces…the hardest part was to figure out which was the right side on the dichroic glass.  This picture shows how the glass is stacked:

Carol was in charge of the kilns showing us how the glass looks (or should look) when ready. We made lots of pendants that day as you can see from the pictures below…  The large rectangular shape in the middle is the same pendant picture above, only after firing.

These are my creative pendants, a fish, a flower and an experiment with color…

These are more color experiments with dichro… The one on the left was a cat but I think it melted through so you can’t recognize it…I couldn’t even recognize it myself 

On Sunday I went to the BABE (bay area bead extravaganza) show to see the beautiful beads and buy dichroic glass from Carol and Monty.  I got a pack of mixed transparent glass but since they ran out of other colors, I visited Arrow Springs booth and purchased the rest of my supplies.  Can’t wait until they arrive so I can play with them!  If you’ve never been to the BABE show, I’d say it’s a must see!  There are lots of well known glass artists selling exquisite beads…people like Sharon Peters, Leah Fairbanks, Gail Crossman Moore to name a few.   So next year, be sure to stop by!

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November 8, 2007 by beadreaming.

This dragon bead is a custom order for Barbara. I made a similar one a few months ago and then changed my focus to jewelry for a while and made a lot of smaller beads…so I had to get back to the sculptural bead making groove. Well, it took three attempts before I liked the dragon. Each dragon bead takes me about 40 minutes to an hour to make but I’m definitely pleased with this one. How do I make it? Well first I make the base donut shaped bead and add the swirls and decorations, then I move on to applying glass on the base bead and shaping it like a dragon, starting with the largest parts of the body and adding the small details towards the end. The only tools I use are tweezers, a knife and a tungsten poker so there are no molds involved and each of my creatures has its own personality. During this process, I have to keep the entire bead warm or it will break from temperature shock. After the dragon is made, I warm up the bead one last time and place it in the kiln for annealing. Since I torch in the evening, I get to see the beads the next day when I wake up and it feels like I’m opening a present every time.

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November 7, 2007 by beadreaming.

A few months ago I participated in a charm exchange and each one of us prepared 25 charms…like this was not enough, I joined another exchange…this time for hometown and affirmation charms and signed up for 15 charms of each.  Anyhow, I finally finished them so I wanted to share them with you.  My affirmation charm is love.  These charms were made on copper disks which I hammered, stamped the letters, punched the holes and riveted a glass heart (that I made of course).  I wanted to make it look like a compass with the heart arrow pointing to one of the L-O-V-E directions…so here they are:

My hometown charm was inspired on the Grizzly bears which are the symbol of California.  We visited the San Francisco zoo and found this new exhibit where you can see the bears up close…well, as long as the bear wants to get close to the window…so here is the inspiration

…and here are my glass bears made with AS104 glass.  I reduced them so they look a little iridescent.

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November 1, 2007 by beadreaming.

drum roll…….Cindi H.!!!!  She is the lucky recipient of this happy glass cat!   Cindi, send me your address! Want to win a bead?  Just got to my website and visit the top lampwork and jewelry site and send me an email when doing so to be entered in the raffle!   The next winner will be announced on November 30th!

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