Emerging from Turkey Day - a few listings

Wake up, it's Monday! I'm just emerging from my turkey and Virginia ham coma, so it'll be a short post today! My Thanksgiving was great, I hosted 16 for dinner. It was a full week of being hostess with the mostest and entertaining in my house. Relatives came from all over the country. It was really good all around, no mishaps, the meal was great, and it was a refreshing change of pace from my usual hermit lifestyle. I'm actually feeling quite energized from the whole experience.

I haven't made many beads in the past 2 weeks because I've been busy with the holiday, but here are a couple of listings from my Etsy shop. These are made with the lovely CiM Sangre and gold leaf:I also have two sets of pebble-shaped organic beads. These were made by mixing several different colors together in the flame, pulling the molten glass blob into custom-colored rods, then using the rods to make beads:
Hope your Cyber Monday has been prosperous!

Coffee Beads

I've been busy getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday. I'm hosting dinner for 16! My parents are arriving tomorrow, which means I've been housecleaning! Scrubbing the stove, re-arranging the furniture, scraping the kids' modeling clay off the floor... and I think I've located the dust bunny warren! All of this cleaning just makes me want to relax for a minute with a nice hot cup of cinnamon French roast coffee...I made this set of coffee bean beads and a coffee mug bead last week, it's listed in my Etsy shop. The coffee beans are etched and look very realistic! I thought I had sold the set a few days ago when a customer put it in her cart. She hadn't paid after a day, so I sent her a reminder. She replied that she could not figure out how it got into her cart, and then discovered that her 7-year-old niece had put it in there as a "surprise" for her! :-D Oh well, it's back on the market now!

Also this week, I've made a silver cored bead for a custom order. It has a base of Aurae Light:My customer emailed me about making a silver cored bead for her based on this set of Aurae Light and Kronos frit beads I'd made in the past:When I took this glass recipe and made a silver cored bead with it, the Aurae Light base glass struck to a reddish-orange color, I think because of the heat required for the bigger bead. The Kronos frit and the Aurae fumed nice blue, green a purple colors.

TGIF!

***ETA: My customer for the silver cored bead can't use it because of the orange-red color, so I'll be listing it in my Etsy shop soon. [Not having much luck with the sales of these beads this week, am I? :-D]

Silver Glass Crystal Beads

Good evening bead and jewelry lovers!
I'd like to share a few beads I've made this past week, but before I do, I just need to say one more time I LOVE MY NEW KILN!!! I look forward to torching just to use it. The old kiln I was using was my very first bead kiln. I bought it in 1998. It was one of the first kilns designed specifically for beads, called the Toaster Kiln, made by Brian Kerkvliet and sold by Frantz. Kiln manufacturers have really improved on the game since then. This new kiln from The Glass Hive is like a luxury Cadillac SUV compared to the old Datsun 210 of a Toaster kiln! If you've never seen a Glass Hive kiln, click on this link --> The Glass Hive and check them out!
And now, to the beads...

These sets were made for a custom order. This first set uses Ekho:These are Luna:These are Triton and Kronos:All of the beads were encased with Aether clear and formed with the crystal press.

My customer had actually asked me to make her some Luna crystals based on this set (below) I'd made for her before, but I couldn't do it for the life of me! The Luna crystals pictured above as you can see turned out dark blue! The difference is that my skills have changed with Luna and I can strike it better now. But is it really better? This older set is actually more colorful. Try as I might, I could not undo my skills to make poorly struck beads. Ha!
I have more stuff I could blab on about, but this post is already getting long. I'll have to come back tomorrow and show you what else I've been up to.
Cheerio!

New Kiln!

I am so excited! My new Glass Hive "Regular Guy" kiln arrived! Let me share the excitement of opening the box with you...And here she is, all shiny and stainless steel and gorgeous:The photo was taken before I screwed on the door handles and the mandrel shelf that comes off the front. Now it's all put together and in my studio and I just love staring at it! I did manage to shake myself out of my love-sick trance last night long enough to fire it up and give it a test run. My beads came out great, with no kiln marks or anything.

It's a very roomy kiln at 20 inches wide. Much bigger than my old kiln. I'm going to be able to fit lots of beads in here. With my old kiln I could only work about 4 hours before it was filled. I think I could get 6-8 hours out of this kiln. Another great feature of this annealer is the handles on the top. It's very heavy and those handles are great for transporting.

Javalina Home Invasion

Last night around 2 am I heard a snorting and a scuffling on my back porch. Javalinas again. Javalinas are like wild pigs, though they're more closely related to rats. They stink pretty bad and they travel through the neighborhood in packs, devouring anything that might by any stretch of the imagination be considered potentially edible. I once saw some javalinas eating an aluminum pie plate.

Tonight, they were after my bird seed and potted plants. I keep the bird seed in a metal pail with a locking lid next to the back door. The lock was child's play to these beasts. At 2 am birdseed was scattered all across my back porch and 10 javalina adults and 3 babies were rooting through it. Two potted plants were eaten down to nubs or less. All that remained of them were tipped-over pots and dirt everywhere.

I tried scaring the javalinas away to get things cleaned up, but it's hard to scare a javalina. All they did was back up a few feet and stare at me with beady eyes. They can be especially aggressive when they have babies with them so I was a little cautious. It took about 1/2 hour to scare them off after that. They'd just hide in the bushes and come back when they thought I was gone. Finally I gave it up and hit the hay.

This morning I woke up and made my sleepy way to the kitchen. Through slitted eyes I could see the bag of cat food had been ripped open. Cat food was strewn across the floor. Hmmm. Now who could have done this? I only have one explanation, and it's not my little sweetums kitty-cat Tony! It was the cute baby javalinas! They're the only ones in the pack that could have fit through the new cat door I just installed! Wow! So javalinas came into my house while I was sleeping?!?! Great!!!!!

I really really do think November is going to be a great month, despite this and the fact that every candidate and ballot measure I voted on yesterday lost. This is McCain country after all. Gotta love Arizona! Javalinas, scorpions, tarantulas, Republicans, it keeps life exciting!!!

Disclaimer: No javalinas or Republicans were harmed in the writing of this blog post.

Peace my friends, hope you had a happy hump day!