Green shoots

I made oodles of these beads yesterday. They are very simple but I needed simple yesterday - just a very light coloured aqua glass with green silver-rich frit melted in and then reduced to give the shiney irridescence which the photograph doesn't quite capture but you get a bit of an idea how pretty they are. Something made me mad yesterday morning, I haven't been as angry as that for a l-o-o-ng time and when I went out into the studio, my hands were shaking and I just felt cross all over. I couldn't make anything until after I'd written a letter absolutely laying into the offending party (not a member of my family and not likely to be anyone who reads this). I won't go into all the boring details as it'll take far too long. Just someone being extremely thoughtless and in the big scheme of things the problem they created will just go away in the course of the next few days.

When I get like that, it completely blocks my creative abilities and so I needed something that I could mindlessly get on with. DH gets annoyed that I let something like that interfere with my work but I'm a sensitive little soul! Once I'd written the letter, I calmed down quite a bit as I felt like I'd dealt with it. But I still had a total blockage on all the lovely new ideas I had woken up with that I was going to try. Hence simple beads, repetitive making over 30 of them but it enabled me to get my inner calm back. They are going to make some really smashing jewellery, sometimes it's quite difficult to fit complicated art beads into jewellery designs. However, the jewellery has to wait today, because the weather is nice for the first time this week, I'm going to get all my gardening duties out of the way.

The letter has been posted today but I cut it down dramatically into something a lot more professional and matter of fact - rising above it all! The good news is I am back to myself now. I've had a lovely morning trying lots of new things out on beads that are presently annealing in my kiln so hopefully I will have more interesting beads to show off tomorrow!