Of earrings and business cards

I made some earrings last week that are now up for sale at HeatherKellyGlass on Etsy. They’re my own lampwork beads: green core encased with clear and with red-orange dots on the surface. I wire-wrapped the beads onto fine silver headpins (that I made with my soldering torch!) and dangled them from my handmade sterling fancy earwires, so they can dance about as you move. They *can* be festive if you like, but they’re also suitable for wearing all year round.

I finished doing my DTP for designing business cards and stickers last night, so my order to Moo.com has gone in. If you sell on Etsy, you can get a free pack of 50 full-size business cards from Moo – they have a small Etsy logo in the bottom left of the photo side. It’s worth going through to the image upload section before you design them fully so you can see where the logo will go, especially if you’re putting your business name on that side. I had to do a quick bit of moving things around, but I think they look rather good now, if I do say so myself! I refreshed my Mini Moo card designs at the same time and ordered a new pack, plus a sticker book. Cos I like stickers! Now I will have stickers with close-ups of my beads on them! Moo’s 30% off sale ends tonight – if you don’t have time to get in there, I’ve got a referrer link that should give you 10% off if you’re a new customer (and it gives me some points towards an order).

Beads, buttons and ring toppers for sale!

My Etsy shop is up and running: HeatherKellyGlass on Etsy. I’m adding a new item each day, so check back often!

Currently up we have an autumnal focal lentil, a decorative button in blue and green, and a bright orange-pink silver glass interchangeable ring topper.

The ring toppers are great – they have a small nut in the back that will screw onto a 2.5mm threaded screw. You can get rings in sterling or stainless steel, pendant backings and cufflinks that you can screw the toppers on to. So you can have one ring and dress it up depending how you feel on the day! You can collect little wearable bits of glass art from your favourite lampworkers and show them off.

Sabine Little of LittleCastleDesigns has the rings in stainless and sterling, pendant backs in both, and cufflinks in stainless steel.

George Harper East (mizgeorge.co.uk, mizgeorge on Etsy) makes sterling silver adjustable rings for adults and children – these are fab, I have one and it is incredibly comfortable to wear. She also takes commissions if you want something a bit different.

I went for adjustable because my fingers change size quite a bit through the course of a day depending on how hot they get! I didn’t wear rings at all before this, now I can wear my own toppers (and the advantage of a ring topper over a necklace, say, is that you can see it yourself all the time!).

I’ve started a glass-related Twitter account: GlassByHeather where you can keep up to date with new listings, and also see me wittering on about glass in general.

Pumpkins!

For Hallowe’en I made myself a new pumpkin necklace and earrings (last year I made polymer clay pumpkin jewellery).

Pumpkin necklace

I used CiM creamsicle for the focal and earring beads. Really like this colour, it’s darker than dark yellow but lighter than orange, which is pretty much where I like it. Full orange is a bit bright for me! I only had one skinny rod of it, though, so the spacers are pastel yellow.

The pumpkin focal is a hollow bead that I ran over a groovy marver and then razored to deepen the lines. I added black stringer in the grooves and leaves made with vine cane. The small earring pumpkins are just razored.

The other spacers are transparent dark grass green and CiM clockwork. Clockwork is a lovely colour. It comes out a misty semi-transparent deep orange that just glows.

I strung the necklace on knotted brown cotton cord, with the addition of triangular seed beads in a variety of greeny-yellow shades. I like knotted necklaces for lampwork because they make sure everything stays balanced and are very comfortable to wear. I made a sterling silver swan neck clasp for it – I also find these very comfortable and easy to put on and take off, with no danger of them coming undone unexpectedly.

There’s an extra loop of cord at the back because I was putting it together when I was rather tired and I carefully measured and knotted off the end… then cut the wrong side! So I had to add another bit to make it the right length. The earrings are crimped on to beading wire.

Normally I wouldn’t think of wearing yellow or orange… this necklace is an exception and I love it! A couple of people mentioned to me that it looks Christmassy, probably because of the combination of green and orange, so I declared it Festive Pumpkins and wore it at Christmas too :)

Any other holidays I could make vaguely pumpkin-related for it?

Lampwork: week 16

[June 7-13]

This week I was trying to use red, green and blue in the same bead. It’s tricky.

Fritties: Sangre lentil encased in clear with chameleon frit. BeadySam’s Gem Surprise frit over white, then over a sangre core that was encased in clear, then over dark lavender, then over periwinkle. Dragons Candy frit over sangre (way too dark!). Dark blue transparent over white with Gem Surprise.White core encased in teal, with robin’s egg blue frit. Another sangre core encased in clear with Gem Surprise.

Fritties

Jungle beads. I’m calling them that because the lentil looks like someone twisted a jungle! The bases are sangre, periwinkle and pea green, and I used some short ends of twisties from Jolene to decorate each bead. The lentil was half periwinkle, half pea green with all the leftover little twistie ends from the other beads, and the centre was swirled.

RGB jungle beads

Another pair of tries with red, green and blue. The left lentil is a white core, half encased in dark grass green, half in cobalt blue, zig-zag and dot decoration on top. The second is a pea green base with black hair thin stringer lines, encased in teal, then med lapis, dark turquoise and dark blue transparent trails, and sangre on top.

RGB lentils

I decided after these that to use red, green and blue successfully together in one bead, I probably needed a fair amount of white in it as well. Haven’t tried that yet, though!

I had another go with Reichenbach silver brown. Here there is a silver brown core, reduced and encased in clear, and a sangre core encased in silver brown, reduced and encased in clear. The second one in particular I got too hot while trying to melt the clear round.

Silver brown rounds

Variety of things:
Pale green apple faux boro stringer over sangre, encased in clear. Hades and multicolour dark twistie over sangre. Sangre with very thin rings of MCD, encased in clear. Repeat of the first one but with more faux boro stringer.

Faux boro etc

And a matching lentil – sangre with pale green apple faux boro stringer, encased.

Faux boro lentil

In the How Not To Do It files, silver brown over sangre lentil, reduced and then begun to be encased… It was taking ages, I already suspected I’d got the core too hot, and then the fire alarm in the hall started beeping because its battery was running down. So I put the bead away as was and went and fixed the alarm.

Wrongggg

Here we have a kryptonite lentil rolled in purpur, chameleon, robin’s egg blue and granny apple green frit and the centre swirled. The middle two rounds are dirty martini with those same frits and then with a red frit blend. Finally, a rose opalino lentil with purple twisties.

Pastels

This is rose opalino and Reichenbach pink lady with SIS round the centre and swirled, plus Jolene’s purple murrini.

Rose lentil

Teal lentil with quartz grey shards. I was going to do more with this, but broke my bead release. Then two somewhat messy kaleidoscope beads from Passing the Flame. Then two tiger-ish beads. The first is a black base with a green and red twistie, SIS, some uranium yellow transparent and encased in clear. The second is a black base, SIS, yellow and red twistie and some amber on the surface.

Shard and PTF beads

Lampwork – newbie week 3

March 9 – 16

Newbie week 3 beads

Here we have… (right to left)
1. Dots – dark grey opaque base with dark chocolate brown, ivory and coral dots.
2-3. Cat and penguin, see below.
4. Ivory mashed bead with random raked coral.
5-6. Coral spacers. One heated up more times than the other.
7-10. Iris gold frit on white, black and twice on dark ivory.
11. Bicone attempt. Dark ivory with dark turquoise ends, dots and stripes.

Catmouse and penguin

Catmouse and penguin

More critters! The cat ended up with a bit of a mouse face… I’m pleased with the penguin, though I’ve realised that if I make them with the bead hole running that way, if I want to make them into jewellery, I’ll have to thread them on something that won’t let them turn easily or they’ll hang upside down.

Fairy beads – these were for the (extended) February Newbie Challenge on Frit-Happens!

Green fairies - all

1. Tree. A grass green trans cylinder base with iris opal yellow frit on the bottom and green aventurine frit on top, then the tree done in black stringer. The green aventurine doesn’t show up very much as it’s rather dark.
2. Round. Grass green transparent base, iris gold frit. Then I tried putting little bug-like shapes on with stringer dots – lime green and turquoise. Then encased with clear, which turned the bugs into abstract bits of colour instead…
3. Oblong tree with fairy. Grass green trans and iris gold frit again, encased in more grass green and mashed into an oblong. Tree on one side – black stringer, lime green stringer and aventurine green frit for leaves. Added a bit too much so it went all blobby. Fairy on the other side – dark ivory and turquoise and some trans mid purple that doesn’t show. There was more decoration at the top so I had to add extra green glass to the bottom to even out the thickness a bit.
4. Large cylinder with bug-fairy. Grass green trans and iris gold frit again, encased in clear with a little more iris gold on top. The fairy shape is in coral with petrol green and turquoise dots. The coral was probably a bad idea – it looks dull grey-purple when hot, so I ended up using too much of it without realising quite how bright it would end up.
5. Eye! Lime green opaque core, encased in grass green trans. The eye is two dark ivory dots with a black one in the centre, then a small ring of ivory over the black for the iris. The iris has cobalt blue and grass green dots. Black stringer around top, going to a small squiggle. Corner of the eye is light pink with striking red on top. There were then trails of 3 dots in cobalt or lime green decorating other places on the bead. Then I encased the whole thing in clear, which in hindsight was probably a bad idea. The eye itself looks ok, though more smeary than it originally was, but the rest is rather lost. The encasing isn’t great either – I was getting tired and it was taking forever to melt smooth. The slightly irregular shape feels quite nice to hold, though.

Closeups of some

Fairy trees detail