I need a new name

The new name is not for me, I know who I am (well, most of the time I do!) It's for these:
This morning I have been taking photographs and updating the Lampwork jewellery page of my website with new jewellery. There are a couple of new crocodile bead earrings and a super double length crocodile bead necklace on that page but the stars of this week's updating is this new jewellery range using beads made from recycled Cava bottles and turquoise. Indeed, I have only just realised that I need a new page in my Recycled section for recycled Cava beads; I don't seem to have ever photographed them before and I usually have a few pairs for sale most weeks. Until I get round to making the new page, I'm just putting them on my Lampwork jewellery page.

All I am calling them at the moment is Cava Turquoise which seems very boring so ... I am having a second competition in two days. To enter, please just post a name for this new jewellery range as a message in the comments section or E-mail me using the contact page on my website. I will choose the new name from my favourites but everyone's name who enters will go into a hat and I will draw out a winner whose prize will be a pair of earrings of their choice from the new range.

If you want to see them in person, do stop by my stall at the Art & Craft Market in Cambridge tomorrow, I'm looking forward to showing them off!

This afternoon I have been to see Jonathan Hobbs, the osteopath who has done such sterling work to unfreeze my neck and cure that persistent headache which plagued me for much of January. It's steadily been getting better day by day and I've only had one dose of painkillers in the last three days; I still get the odd twinge but I feel so much better now and I'm able to think. He's suggested that I don't go back for 4-6 weeks when he'll check me out again to make sure I'm not tightening up. In the meantime, I've got some upper back exercises to do which should help.

Now I'm feeling back to normal, I'm finding that suddenly I've got lots of ideas for updating the display area of my stall which was one of my top priority jobs for this month but I just couldn't seem to get "switched on". Now that I'm feeling myself again, I am looking forward to putting it all into practice. I had hoped to have that done by now but watch this space for more news soon!

Heads I lose

I've had a headache for ages and ages. It started a couple of days after boxing day. It was a slight inconvenience at first, didn't hurt that much but got worse as the day went on; enough to make me grumpy in the evenings.

I've suffered headaches ever since puberty. They usually last 2 days (3 tops) and are on one side of my head - I get them 4/5 times a year. Sometimes they have kept me off work in the days when I had a proper job and sometimes even now I'm a super-motivated-self-employed-if-I-don't-work-I-don't-get-paid kind of gal, they occasionally stop me in my tracks and I have to have a lie down when it gets too bad.

However, this new headache was in the back of my skull, low down and if I leant down or moved my head too quickly, there was a kind of horrible pounding for 5-8 beats; feeling like my veins aren't wide enough to take the blood flow. It wasn't nearly bad enough to stop me doing anything and a couple of disprin would get rid of it altogether for several hours but it always came back.

After nearly a fortnight, I resignedly made an appointment with my doctor last Friday. She diagnosed a muscle spasm in my neck going down my back and gave me some neck stretching exercises to "unspasm" it. She says it's common amongst people like me who hunch over their work, when I expressed how it was odd I'd never got this before as I've been working like that for ages, she said the additional factor - which won't have helped - is the exceptionally cold weather, I guess this makes sense. She also told me ibuprofen was a better painkiller than Disprin so I got some whilst I was in the village and DH drove me home. She said to carry on working if I felt like it, to stop regularly to do the exercises and take ibuprofen for a week and come back if there's no improvement.

What I experienced this weekend was a massive under-improvement. This new headache invited my old style headaches to come along for a party (I guess at least three turned up) and together they wreaked absolute havoc for two days straight. I couldn't get out of bed on Saturday at all. I'm feeling a bit more myself now but have gone back to Disprin as a painkiller as ibuprofen takes an hour to kick in, lasts only two hours and then wears off.

The trouble with taking painkillers for any length of time is that though I feel more comfortable whilst under their influence, I don't feel like "me" any more. It's like this zombified version of Sue Doran is inhabiting my body and just goes through the motions without any of my usual zest. I feel like I'm walking around in a fog and my creativity is dulled and uninspired.

In the few days when the new headache wasn't too bad, I felt able to work but the nagging at the base of my head still got in the way of doing anything new and exciting. So I used the "not too bad" time to tidy up my torch station, all the odd half rods were sorted out into opaques, light transparents and dark transparents and then sorted into individual colours. Then I had a massive torching session melting all the half rods together as it was something I could do that required no creative input. When they were cool, I sorted them into my glass stash and I suddenly have a lot more glass! I found 20 half rods of lavender blue alone; I thought I was getting close to needing a new order of glass colours that I use a lot of but I think I can go for several more weeks before that's necessary so have saved myself a bit of cash there!

I made some more beads for my bag because I can make those fairly mindlessly and so that project is coming along nicely.

On one of the days, Shaz and I had an enamelling day, she doesn't have a kiln so we shared mine. She was supposed to go on a course yesterday but it got cancelled due to the weather (aren't you just so fed up with the snow now?!)

Here are the pieces I made with some of the blues and greens, I need to practice enamelling a lot more as there are problems with all of these - particularly evenness of coverage - but my favourite so far (but still not of saleable quality) is the little oval with the cloisonne heart. This uses a transparent enamel which allows the textured scratches I put on the background to show through.These are the most successful beads I've made since Christmas. They're quite simple, a transparent glass with only a hint of colour in the rod rolled in a frit blend and then a hint of extra iris gold frit melted in and then reduced. The photograph doesn't do them justice; the pic is a bit dark and the reduction irridescence doesn't show much at all but hopefully you get the idea. I can't get outside to photograph them as it's been snowing since breakfast time here so this is a window sill job. The beads remind me of a pair of shoes I had when I was around 8. They were super shiny patent leather with like a snakeskin pattern on them but I - for some reason - always referred to them as my crocodile shoes.These are some winter-inspired beads; we've been in the grip of this hard winter for so long, it's difficult to remember how hot I got in the studio during Wimbledon fortnight last year! Anyway, these are icy blue transparent glass, ringed with raised stringers of double helix glass which have been reduced to a blue mirror finish. These beads demonstrate the difficulty of making hand shaped cylinders all the same size!