Large hole bead bracelets

Over the past several weeks, I've been building up my stock of large hole Pandora style silver core lined beads (what a mouthful!) I'm displaying them on my stall on starter bangles, which are also available to purchase at less than half the price of a Pandora starter bracelet. The bangles are available in three sizes, a child's size, medium which will fit a lady with a UK dress size of (say) 8 to 12 and large for (say) size 14 over.

I've photographed a couple to show you what they look like with a selection of my glass bead, this blue one includes some sterling silver and also features three of my fine silver spacers right in the middle which I wrote about a while ago. The ends of the bracelet unscrew and you can therefore put as many or as few beads on the bangle as you like. The starter bangle includes two friction beads which go either side of your chosen beads to keep them tidily in place.

If you're out and about in Cambridge, the weather forecast is for fair weather on Saturday and I'd love to welcome you to my stall in the All Saints Art & Craft Market. Whatever you're up to, I hope everyone has a good weekend,

Another Pandora bracelet

It was Sandy's birthday this week. She absolutely loved the Pandora bracelet that DH bought for my birthday that I featured in my blog last month and the beads that I made to adorn it. Sandy's long term partner, Chris, picked up on the hint and got her a Pandora bracelet and enlisted my help in putting together some beads to go onto it.

Sandy's colours are pink, blues and purples. I had already started knitting a pair of pink bedsocks as one of her presents and so we went with blues and purples for the bracelet. Chris paid for the bracelet, mum and dad bought the sterling silver clips to stop the beads moving about, Sharon bought the silver flower charm spacer and I made the glass beads and sterling silver PMC spacers. I'm glad to say that she was really pleased with it (and the socks!)

The photograph of her bracelet has given me an idea for presenting the large hole Pandora-style beads that I make on my website (which as you know, I am currently going through the machinations of changing the structure of in order to make it easier to maintain). More on that soon, though.

In the meantime, being self-employed this week has given me far too much freedom to watch Wimbledon and football instead of doing work!! However, Andy Murray isn't playing til Saturday (have to miss that one), there are no historically long matches on the cards, England don't play til Sunday so I am hoping to get plenty done on Friday - including the jewellery photographs promised earlier in the week. I hope I can have a productive day :-)

PMC spacers

A couple of weeks ago, a little while after Missy's op, she had a minor set back when she started bleeding. The vet wasn't concerned as long as she was bright and not listless. He said it's not uncommon for a blood clot to form at the site of the operation if she'd overdone something. As long as it only lasted 3-4 days, then it wasn't anying to worry about. Keeping a usually active dog quiet for 10 days is really difficult, you can't exactly nail their paws to the ground!

Anyway, it meant me keeping a close eye on her as the vet said to bring her straight back immediately if she started to act like she was feeling poorly. Instead of beadmaking in the garden studio with her possibly risking infection from lying on the grass, I worked indoors and made some PMC* spacers that I'd been wanting to try for ages to fit Pandora, Biagi, Troll etc. bracelets. Instead of drying the PMC flat, when the clay was still leather hard, I draped them over pencils, knitting needles, toothpicks etc to get different degrees of wavy-ness from them so when you've got more than one on your bracelet, it sets up different rythyms of spaces.

I got round to firing and polishing them up on Friday and the above photograph is the result.

They were really popular with my large hole Pandora style bead customers on Saturday. They all sold out, so thanks, Missy; I have a new product line!

Here is another photograph of a few on my own Pandora bracelet and you'll notice that the edges have been decorated on a couple. I ran out of time but I was going to patina these with liver of sulphur and then polish so the patina just rested in the grooves/holes. I shall be making more very soon and I have lots of ideas for variations and hopefully I'll have time to patina these before I sell them.

* For non-jewellery makers, PMC stands for Precious Metal Clay. It is made from particles of fine silver, water and binder combined to make clay which is similar in texture to plasticine. It can be moulded, cut and shaped anyway you like when it's wet. When it's dry, you fire it in a kiln, the binder burns away, leaving behind fine pure silver.

Glass behaving badly

Today I'd like to highlight the difficulties of working with the unpredictability of some glass colours. I made the bead on the left last week and was really pleased with the lovely purples and blues that I got out of encasing Double Helix's Pandora glass. It's quite an expensive glass containing a lot of silver and that's what leads to all the fun! I've had some Pandora in my glass stash for a long time and never managed to get any really nice colours out of it but when I "stormed" the glass before encasing after buying a tutorial on the storming technique written by Amy Kinsch, the bead on the left was the happy result.

Delightedly, I made a batch of them the following day and was careful to ensure the beads were "garaged" for approximately the same length of time (2 hours) as I know the length of the time the beads soak at annealing temperature can affect the colours Pandora gives you. I swear I made them exactly the same way, I even used the same stringer of stormed glass - the only difference is that the beads are a little smaller as I usually make earrings first and then find out what my jewellery customers think before I invest more time in making matching bracelets/necklace. But the bead on the right is representative of the colours I got this time - all 6 beads were the same. Oh well, back to the drawing board on Pandora!

Red is another tricky one ... Here are some triangle beads that I made with a transparent black base, dots of Effetre fossil (which give a stratified effect which looks a bit like a swirly fingerprint in the background) and then each dot is encased with Effetre transparent red. Again, I tried to ensure I made all the beads exactly the same way but look at the colour shift I got when striking - the ones on the right are positively orange!

Of course, us long-suffering beadmakers are not helped when the glass itself changes colour at the manufacturer.Over the last three years, these are the different colours of "Iris Blue" I have been sent.

Customers often wonder why I can't guarantee to match beads that I have already made with more ...!

There is always a solution to badly behaved glass - cake! I baked these fairy cakes yesterday. They seem to be called cupcakes nowawadays but when I was young, my mum used to make these for our birthday parties and we called them angel fairy cakes (the bits on the top are supposed to be angel's wings) so that's what I'm sticking to. I have tried to make them look exactly the same as she did, my sisters will undoubtedly tell me whether I've got them right or not and I shall take some round to my mum and dad's next time we visit so we can take a trip down memory lane; there are only two years between Sandy and I; there was always a battle over the right to lick the spoon and bowl after the cakes were made. :-)

New large hole beads

At last, I have got a selection of large hole beads on my Pandora-style webpage. A sneak preview of three of them here: On the page itself you get two views of each bead, one from the side and one from the top. There will be more soon.

I am hoping this morning will have fewer interruptions than yesterday. I was gonna make soooo many beads yesterday morning. I was out there turning on the kiln at 8.30am eager with anticipation - lovely weather but not too hot (just how I like it). Missy could be in the paddock outside the studio with me. The first interruption was a courier delivering a small parcel I had forgotten I was expecting, not long after that, the postman arrived with a parcel that I was expecting (so I can't really count that one). At every interruption there is a huge commotion from my dog, Missy, who was in the paddock growling and barking at every visitor until I come out of the studio and then she lets me be in charge (sometimes!)

I'd got back into beadmaking and then my Landlady, Penny, turned up. She's lovely and always terribly short of time so that didn't take long. She was warning me that a man would be with me later to do the annual service of the fire extinguishers and she was checking I was in. So I go back to beadmaking for a bit and then the man turns up.

I left the two extinguishers at the back door and asked him if he wanted a cup of tea, by the time the kettle had boiled and I took it out he had finished! I had my own tea in my hand ready to go back to work myself; I’ve been happy to go back into the shed and leave his tea with him if he was still working but as he’d finished, I didn’t feel like I could abandon him to stand around whilst he drunk it on his own so I had to drink my tea with him. Fortunately, he was a bit scared of dogs so I took him up a bit closer to Missy and this time I didn’t stop her barking so he left as quickly as possible!

Normally, you know, I don't see a soul all day if DH is working in Lincoln or Cambridge. So when I got back to work I was confident that I could go straight through til lunchtime with no further interruptions but no ... someone delivering leaflets walked past on their way to the letterbox and got Missy going again (sigh!) I gave up as a bad job - I am not good at being interrupted when I'm beadmaking!

Busy!

I think this bead is really pretty. I made lots of black bubble beads for Fiona's commission, they looked super-sophisticated made up into jewellery and Fiona e-mailed yesterday to say how pleased she was with everything. I'll post a picture after her party on Saturday (don't want to ruin the surprise!)

However, I thought I'd make some brighter bubble beads this week. This experiment is a base bead of violet, rolled in a light sprinkling of baking soda and then encased with aqua coloured glass. I've made a batch of them this morning and they are annealing in the kiln along with some other experimental colour mixes.

I've been a busy gal on my website the last couple of days. I have updated all the outstanding new products onto the Sooz Jewels website (about three weeks worth). There are too many to put here but some of the highlights are detailed on my home page.

I've made a new page for the Red Mist items so all the products are together. In the Red Mist range, I sold a £40 bracelet and a pair of £12 earrings on Saturday and so a cheque for half of those values, plus £6 from last week's sale of a pair of earrings was sent to the Orangutan Foundation yesterday.

I'm hoping to pretty up the Red Mist page with a picture of an orangutan. I've asked the Foundation if they have any available for fundraising purposes but if they don't, I have my eye on this cute picture here, which I will buy.

There's also (at last!) a new page on the website for my Pandora beads. Um ... there aren't actually any beads on the page yet (still got to do the photography for that!) But the starter bracelet is there ready and waiting. Now there's no tennis (sniff!) I may actually get the photography done this week!

Finally, there is also now a Frequently Asked Questions page, too.

Camera and computer still not talking to one another

Despite the fact that my computer is refusing to talk to my digital camera, DH's computer has been far more amenable. Perhaps my laptop was just having a case of Monday blues but it might be time to think about a new one as it's over five years old. But anyway, here are the beads that I promised yesterday. I am going to make some more of these and hopefully get them made up into jewellery this week.

I forget to tell you, I sold my first Pandora style, large-hole bead on Saturday! I only started putting them out for sale on the stall two weeks ago. I still haven't photographed any yet and I want to make a new page on the website for them.

These are jobs that are on the list of jobs to do this week but as its Wimbledon fortnight, I might not get round to everything. I will be wanting to watch all of Andy Murray's games live but for the main, I will content myself with the hour of highlights in the evening. Today he is third on centre court so it's finally time to get my ironing up to date. I can iron inbetween points and not feel so guilty that I'm watching TV in the middle of the day! Wimbledon fortnight is the only time my ironing pile is ever up to date!