Archive for April 2, 2008

Tempestuous troubles

Wednesday morning

Isn’t it fantastic having longer evenings now? I’m starting to get itchy feet and want to get lots of things done, and go abroad, it must be the spring thing. I love this time of year, there’s so much of a feeling of new beginnings. We have several projects that we’re hoping to do here this year, I expect we’re being too optimistic, but we will achieve half of them probably, although it’s already April, how did that happen? and the next 2 weeks ahead are school holidays, I just don’t feel ready for that.

Fridays bead session was fun, although I made 2 rather long beads (the longest being  70mm, although I just about managed 82mm last week before it cracked at each end, I won’t be trying that again!) that took absolutely ages to do, 1 and 1/2 hours each start to finish, then one of them had a nasty crack up the centre at one end, so disheartening. It’s always the same when you have a deadline, these beads are attempt number 5 and 6 for the Tempest invitational exhibition that I’m taking part in, and I only have 3 out of the 6 beads to choose from due to various cracks and problems with this design. I can see I won’t be doing many more of these, but I will try and do a smaller version that is quicker and easier to keep in one piece while I’m working on it.

I filled the rest of my time with quicker things, experiments with pleat beads, I’d always wondered how Nicole Zumkeller and Eric Seydoux did their close lines, and had worked it out for myself then came across a great couple of threads on Lampwork etc . I had fun with this technique, taking it further than the tutorials for my first bead. Pics will follow later if I can persuade hisnibs to get them ready for me.

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