Lampworking day #72. A kiln disaster, but some murrini practice. :)

The craziest thing happened on Sunday.  I made some murrini, I made some beads, I put them in the kiln, and I went to have lunch.  When I returned... the kiln was on 1500*F!!!!  (It's only supposed to go up to 960)  ...It smelled like a disaster, and that's what it was.  I lost everything in the kiln.  I though the kiln was ruined, too... but thankfully it wasn't.  I was so angry with myself for leaving the kiln.  I thought I had missprogrammed it but I'm thinking that maybe there was a power outage and that it somehow reset the kiln's program and that's how it got messed up.  Either way... I was super bummed at the glass puddles and the loss of every bead I had made that day.  I'm over it now, but overall I'm really dissappointed in this week because I haven't been productive at all.  Tomorrow will be a bead day!  HE DICHO!!!

Here's the pictures of my murrini which did make it because thankfully it doesn't need to be annealed and thus made it through the disaster, and well... some pics of the aftermath.  Because you'll like to see them. 


There's that cane...  It's kind of ugly but keep watching:


Then I cut it up... And voila!




And this is crazy - how did I know to take some pictures while I was working? It's the first time I do this, and I did it for a bead that I never got to see finished. Eerie.


I put some of my murrini in it.  I wonder if it would have turned out well...




A few hours later...



I hate how cool that looks. 

Lampworking day #67. The first pair of earrings.

I promised you the earrings.  And here they are. 






I made these with love out of my lampworked glass beads, sterling silver findings and beads, and a pair of pearly white spacer beads. 

These aren't for sale because they're the very first pair and I think they're actually too heavy to wear.  There's also a few corrections to make that I won't bore you with...  If they were for sale, though, would you buy these?  Please comment.

Much love.

The Sketchbook Project. Wait for it.

The Sketchbook Project: 2011

I am totally doing this, y'all.  Check it out, maybe you'll want to do it too.  Click on it.  I swear it's awesome.

I'm so excited about this!

I made some earrings on tuesday.

I promise to show them to you as soon as possible.  I'm having the craziest week ever at work and I haven't been able to do ANYTHING else. 

I hate it.  I might even write a frustrated artist post sometime...

Lampworking day #64. Night and day.

Ok ok I promise this is the last post for today. 
These are yesterday's beads.  :)

There they are in their huge mandrels...


On the left there's night, and on the right there's day. 


There's the size comparison to a dime.


Note the clean holes. 



These were dificult to photograph because of the reflections.  Do note the sparkly red inside the third bead from the left.


Day was easier to photograph.


Here I used that transluscent lavander again and it hardly burned as much as last time. 


They look like fruit loops.  :)


I like the idea of putting these on a chain and mixing and matching the small beads depending on my mood.


What do you think, would you wear these?

Um!??!!! I might die?! PAOLA

Paola wants me to have a heart attack.  That's why she created this:




Yep.  She wants me to die. 

Paola, you just earned yourself your very own label in my blog.  For realz. 

Today I saw!

On Thursday I also discovered I had recieved this post card!


It's from Jill Wignall's blog Today I Saw.  Which is really cool.  She draws what she sees every day and then sends it as a post card.  She had a post where she offered to mail post cards to her blog readers and that's how I got mine. 

I love it.  Thank you Jill! 

2 months! A sale.

Thursday was my official 2 months since I started lampworking. It feels like yesterday but it also feels like a million years ago that I started with my first Lampworking disaster.

~

Let me tell you about my friend Paola.  Paola is an amazing jewelry designer.  She's been designing jewelry since she was in highschool and she is incredibly creative and a great craftsperson. 
She is basically one of my best friends and I've known her since the first grade, but that's not why I think so highly of her as a jewelry designer.  For real.  And I'm sorry I don't have pictures of her jewelry to link here.  I actually have a few pieces myself.  Maybe in a future post.  :)

Anyway so she came over on thursday to look at some of my beads because she had a gift to make for a friend and she and her boyfriend ended up buying these beads!

The picture is crap but if you've  been paying attention you remember these beads. 

There she is with her purchase!  Thanks Pao! 


Here's a picture Pao sent me of the earrings she made with some of the beads she bought. 


Aren't they great?  What a cool combination. 

Paola, I am looking forward to doing more business with you and also you need to teach me how to make some jewelry like yours!  :D  Once you have a website I'll be linking it all the time mmkay???

I can't wait. 

Lampworking day #61, four big holed beads and a hollow bead disaster. ...for a change?


These are from Wednesday and I can't even begin to tell you what a big disaster this was.  I mean you're welcome to skip forward to the pictures, but seriously you won't get to experience the disaster unless I tell you about it. 

My idea here was to make four big holed beads and one hollow bead and just put them in the kiln and forget about them until the next day.  Sounds easy enough right?  NOT. 


Ok so here's what happened.  I've told you all about bead release.  It's the gunk you put on the mandrel (the steel stick) so that the bead won't fuze with the steel and you can remove it afterwards, with a hole in the middle.  Anyway... so I don't know what the hell happened, if I was pulling on the glass too hard or if the gunk wasn't applied properly... but my glass kept getting off the mandrels!  It happened.. THREE TIMES.  On two of these beads.  Can you guess which ones they were?


If you guessed the ones on the right, you are correct.  Honestly I don't know how I got them to stick eventually, but thank god I did, cause that's kind of a lot of glass that I didn't want to waste.  Also I just love the colors and I don't have a lot of them. 


Oh and I didn't mention it before but I also used some of my glittery powder on these.  I didn't realize they would look so matte but I still like the fact that I got it only on the dots, it looks cool.  And purposeful, which it was!



Here you can see the disaster a little better.  I'm loving the color combination though.


And this lump is the hollow bead I was trying to make.  I won't show you yet what one is supposed to look like if you don't know, cause then you'll think this is pretty, like my friend Paola did. 


You can tell by the shape of the hole that this was not an easy bead to turn... ;)  This is the third one that didn't stay on the mandrel.


I do regret this didn't turn out right because this was a lot of glass and I really love the color combination.  :(  But I will try again!  I will.

THEN.  You think I'm done right?  No.  My kiln wasn't programmed correctly so after all of these beads are sitting in the kiln ready to anneal ...THE TEMPERATURE STARTS TO GO DOWN!   So I frantically start to re-program it the fastest that I can so that they anneal properly... while the temperature is quickly dropping.  I finally got it but I'm sure they're not properly annealed.  These will go back in the kiln the next time I batch anneal.  :( 
I was so scared while it was happening and my mom was yelling at me to come to dinner... I wanted to kill her.  She just didn't understand.  lol

Anyway, they're not so bad.  I really like the colors.  :)  And of course I love their huge holes. 

Lampworking day #59, just cleanin' out some holes...


Lampworking day #59 was all about cleaning out holes.  Here are all the beads drying off after being cleaned out.  :)


The pictures aren't the greatest but you've actually already seen all of these beads before!


I hope you know what this means... Jewelry, coming soon.  :)

Lampworking day #58, an explosion!


Remember this coin is dime sized. 

The beads on the left are just like the other beads I've been making so far, except for the fact that they were all made with the same colors, except in different patterns and combinations.  I like to see them as a set. 
The beads on the right are my first two big-holed beads!  And they make me ridiculously happy, because I get to wear them right away, since they were annealed immediately in the kiln through my BEAD DOOR!  I finally used it!!! wooohoooooooo


I love making beads like this because they're each so unique.  I like to let the glass kind of do it's own thing as I layer it, because I like the interesting shapes I get to see later.



Strike a pose, little bead.

...

And then... YOWZA!


Those are some big holes!  ::snickering::


There's the small one on my mom's gold chain.  (She promptly claimed it)


And here's the bigger one on my gold chain.  I absolutely love how these two go together... I will definitely make a few in the same colors and hopefully have a set or something.  The really exciting part of making these is that they can be strung on virtually any necklace and I don't have to worry about making the jewelry.  And I can sell them Pandora style.  That's pretty cool.  I look forward to making lots of these.  I've already gotten a lot of compliments and potential buyers!  :D

Check out that big hole!


I love you, big-holed beads!