New jewellery

I haven't been updating the website as often as I usually with jewellery. I have a germ of an idea about how to re-arrange it and so am holding off in the meantime. There are always lots of new things every single week on my Saturday stall at All Saints Art & Craft Market in Cambridge, I very rarely photograph everything new. Quite often, it will be a pair of earrings in a style I've done before but with beads I haven't made in that design before ... if I photographed every piece of jewellery for the website, it would take too long to upkeep. The new way I plan to rearrange the website will address this point but I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the meantime, I'll be adding new beads that I've been making to the blog and any new designs of jewellery will also be featured but I'll keep you posted with news.

Here are just three new things that I've made this week.


(Larger version if you click the image).

More blues

Not BB King or Muddy Water blues, these are hap-hap-happy blues. I made a couple of these beads as experiments and have decided to go into production with them, there are a whole bunch of them cooling down in the kiln as I type. They have a CIM Lapis base, a frit blend melted in and then encased in clear. I like the way the Lapis has "veined" behind the individual shards of frit colours.

Beside the sea

Lots of things around at the moment seem to involve the sea. There was our lovely holiday a couple of weeks ago on the Northumbrian coast, BBC4 have a season of programmes to do with the sea, the government seems to be all at sea whilst they decide what to do about the hung parliament (Is Gordon Brown waving or drowning I wonder!) I also picked up a commission from a lady who is having a seaside themed wedding in a little under three weeks time. Apparently she is getting married by the sea so her theme followed on from that, I think that is just such a cool idea!

She picked up the three bracelets pictured above on Saturday and was so pleased, she ordered another pink one! (I made sure I got her permission to feature the bracelets in the blog as I didn't want to ruin any surprise). I'm keeping my fingers crossed for fine weather for her.

The blue one is made with recycled glass from a Bombay Sapphire gin bottle, the green one is made from a recycled Perrier water bottle and the pink one is made from Effetre glass with an intense pink frit mixture. The silver beads are a mixture of fair trade Karen Hill tribe fine silver and Bali sterling silver.

Blue is the colour

Laura Sparling, who as regular readers of my blog will know, is my favourite beadmaker, has recently been honoured with becoming a Creation is Messy glass tester (well deserved), you can read more about it in her blog. I've been reading Laura's blog since I first became interested in making beads - even before I started making them myself. She's so knowledgeable, I'm sure she will provide very useful feedback to CiM on their new glasses. She's set herself the target of testing every colour in their range and has done reports on some of them already.

Knowing my passion for all things blue and her inclination towards random acts of kindness, she passed along some of her CiM stash for me to try. The postman delivered one each of every blue rod that CiM do and so one of the main reasons I've been so quiet since I got back from holiday is that I'm having a total blue-fest in my studio and loving it!

I have made lots of experimental beads over the last week but here are a couple of my favourites so far:

This small lentil shaped bead is made from a twistie of Glacier, Lapis and Grumpy Bear (what an odd name for glass!) and then encased with Halong Bay. I will definitely be making more of these after I place an order for more Halong Bay - so far this is my favourite of the new colours.

When you see it "in person", the rod itself is only partially transparent but when it's melted, as you can see, it's completely see thru'.

The footprint of the base of the lentil doesn't quite reach to the end nearest the camera and so you can see some of the bead hole through the transparent encasing - this is a fault in my opinion and when I go into production, the beads I make jewellery out of will have the base extending right to the end.

This prototype of a nugget shaped bead is made with Peacock, which is a CiM colour I already had in my stash but it is shot through with Leaky Pen sent by Laura. Leaky Pen is such an apt name, it is exactly the colour of the ink I used to get all over my fingers when trying to use fountain pens at school. (Yes, I can remember that far back!) It's a very intense colour - a lot goes a long way. The Peacock rod looks similar to Halong Bay in that it is only partially transparent - I don't know if you can see from the photograph but unlike Halong Bay, Peacock has retained some of the semi-opacity and hasn't become totally transparent when melted.

I have made a batch of these beads today but I've put lots more trails of Leaky Pen in them and so they look even better than the one photographed here and more like the nugget beads I was making last year. Hopefully I'll get them made into jewellery and on my stall in time for this Saturday!

At the time I was making the nuggets, I was trying to come up with a transparent turquoise/aquamarine coloured version of it but nothing quite worked. When I saw Pulsar in the CiM blues, I thought I may have found the answer but it's a very bubbly glass if you so much as waft it anywhere near the torch! By encasing it in other transparent colours, I was able to get rid of that effect and get some beads that I like. The photographs haven't come out very well so I'll save those when I can re-do them.

Update on Missy: we are all sleeping much better now, she's much more back to her normal self. The vet saw her for a check up on Tuesday and declared that the wound looked "perfect" so we're all hopeful that the stitches will come out on Monday and she can finally drop the daft looking lampshade.

Missy safe after operation

Bit of a worrying day yesterday, Missy had her operation, I cannot tell you how quiet the house seemed without her once DH took her to the vets. Even though she had a powerful sedative to keep her calm til the operation, Geoff says she was still really interested in the smell of rabbits who were also waiting in a separate cage for operations. All went well and she was back home just before 4pm last night. We have had a pretty sleepless night with her. She doesn't seem to be in any pain as the vet gave her nerve blockers and pain killers as well as antibiotics but she's clearly in a little discomfort so she was fidgety from 2am onwards for the rest of the night (she sleeps on our bed).

Instead of taking a photograph of her a little under the weather and looking daft with the "lampshade" collar she has to wear to stop her licking the wound and unpicking the stitches, I've include a couple of snaps of us taken on holiday last week. Look at the state of my hair(!!); I told you it was windy! And honest, DH isn't attempting to strangle her, she was lovely company on holiday and I'm hoping she'll be back to her normal boundless energy self very soon!