Perfectionism is a trait I have and is most often my downfall,.. as those who also have this trait will understand,..it can, and does very often work against you. However,.. this trait has led me to develop a strong desire to be able to make myself the perfect coffee at home, consistantly,.with only the flavours of the beans and different blends giving a varied taste and interesting appeal.

I used to drinking instant coffee at home blerrrk!,.and at the same time became more and more dissatisfied with the coffee I was having when out and about, so developed my thoughts and desires of being able to make the perfect coffee at home.

So,.. with perfectionism taking hold,.. the persuit for the perfect coffee at home came at a price and I now have an espresso machine, a grinder to ‘grind on demand’ just enough for the cup/s,.. 10k+ of green beans (they last for over a year in this state when stored correctly) and a little home roaster. I’m currently making another roaster so I can roast larger than 100g at a time. I also have a tonne of other coffee making paraphernalia and a dedicated coffee cupboard phrrrt.

I now pour the perfect coffee at home,.way better and fresher than I have ever tasted in any cafe,.. but as tempting as it might be to try out my latest roasts/blends all day long,. I stick to two coffees in the morning,. and usually one or two in the afternoon/evening. So just because I have gone so far as to roast my own green coffee beans and ‘grind on demand’ to obtain the freshest possible coffee,..I’m not a coffee guzzler by any means,. I just desire ultra fresh coffee when I do have it.

I will talk more about my coffee obsession and discoveries and maybe you might be converted too,lol.

My kids occasionally have YouTube frenzies where they look for funny vids, and consequently we’re back on dialup speed for a few weeks each month *sigh*. Sometimes though they dig up some beauties, so I thought I would bring them here to give you a smile.
Here is a little doll that is so gorgeous and animated in her singing. Check out the emotion on her face,..what a cutie. I have watched this video quite a few times over the past 12 months and even love the tune myself as does my daughter. I’d love to know what she is singing though,lol.

Enjoy!

As you can see, things are looking a little different here,.. and very messy and erm.. just wrong ;). I’m playing with things right now and my blog will look a little disjointed with odd looking for a while with strange looking links/titles/categories and so on. I’ve also upgraded wordpress to the latest version but in the process, I can see that a few posts have gone strange with the entire post becoming a link etc…. and I’m sure there will be more anomalies found as I get into it more.

I hope to have everything all configured nicely transformed in a few days time…. but it could take a little longer,.. having done this before with wordpress… it’s fiddly and time consuming.

Hope you will like the new look and more regular updates,…. I’ve been busy over the past 12months,.. but I hope to have time this year to blog a bit.

It’s been a while since my last post,. and when I really looked at it,..I was amazed to see just how long,.. scary!!!

I’ve had to put a few of my loves on hold, while I concentrate all my efforts into caring for my loves at home. Mothers (and fathers) I’m sure can relate to times during their child rearing years when there never seems to be enough time to ‘do it all’.  

Personal interests and activities we once enjoyed and had abundent time for tend to get squished and pushed aside,. then slip right down the bottom of the pile, and you’re too tired to do them anyway if you ever got a reasonable sized chunk of time to partake.

For several years I tried to ‘do it all’,..grabbing a few minutes here and there between loads of washing and running the kids around in the car,..to do a bit more on that bracelet, or make one bead etc,.but it was frustrating beyond belief trying to do these things in minute parcels of time.

I faced a constant stuggle with this,. and even desperately wished that I was a normal mother, who was content to rear her children and not have any other time demanding interests.  I really wished I was born without a creative bone in my body (most of the people I know around me are like that and they are perfectly happy), and that I never had the urge to be creative again. Getting the sudden urge to whip up some nice lampwork beads based on the jacket one of the kid’s teacher’s was wearing, but know it will never happen because you wont get a chance to do it any time soon in the next month or three.  Or the sudden urge to try and capture in watercolour the streams of rain coming out of those amazing sun lit clouds that I pointed out to the kids on the way home from school because it seemed to me to be a fantastic challenge to paint something that in its natural state, looked so unnatural and as I explained to the kids, that even if I were to paint that exactly like it was,.my painting would look wrong because the subject looked wrong and like they were painted badly in the sky.

I decided to stop fighting it and accept that there are just times in ones life when we have to put other things aside for a while, and pick them up again when time allows. So having done that,. I was able to remove the frustration of always looking but never quite finding that minute to spare to do something arty in piece meal chunks. Creativity was sadly stifled anyway,. it’s not like a tap you can just turn on because you have five minutes spare between chores,. then switch off because the kids are grumpy and wanting to be fed again *gasp*.

So, the kids have taken all of me, over the past year pretty much and they have all benefitted from having a very attentive mother,. and I admit it has been nice concentrating fully on them for that time. I did promise myself however, that when they start back at school this year,.. I will try again to ‘do it all’,..well at least let a little creativity back in . 

If all goes to plan,. I hope to write a few more tutes this year,..and hopefully begin one within the next week or two. I plan to fire up the Bobcat torch and play with glass again soon too,.. and I have a nagging urge to dribble some paint onto some watercolour paper. Nothing special,..just wanna mess around and play.

But slowly does it,.. one thing at a time,..I don’t want to go back to how things were.

Just want to say hi to everyone and hope you’re all happy and well.

Cheers,

Remy

I decided to try a Cosmic Swirl bead.  It had several challenging ‘firsts’ for me and if the design turned out well,. to top it off I could attempt to encase it with clear,. hopefully without any carbon scum coating. *crossing fingers*

A first time using silver leaf in my studio, that was kinda cool. The first time stacking dots in such a way and combining colours like this.  The design did turn out beautifully and then I was faced with the scary decision to encase (having never done it successfully before on a bead so large) and possibly ruin a perfectly good bead. Oh what the heck,..it’s only glass right?,lol.

Well the encasing went like a dream,.. I am so thrilled with it,..took forever though, and I think this bead took me about 35mins to make,lol. It is about 1″ in size.

It survived the vermiculite without cracking,.albeit suffering a few pock marks on the surface from putting it in too early *note to self,..bigger beads need a second or two longer to firm up the skin before putting in the vermiculite,…. I was able to snap this photo and two hours later I took my bead out of my purse to show a friend and heard a ‘tink’ sound and felt between my fingers a little explosive energy ;}…..Awesome!,. now I have two cabochons,lol

As luck would have it,. it broke in the best possible way,. with both sides showing off main features beautifully.  I need to keep these as they are for a while because they look really awesome like this and I can see their gizzards. Once I am ‘over it’ perhaps after a few more cracks (which I’ll avoid once I’m able to pop beads straight from torch to kiln), I’m thinking I might just slump these and turn them into real cabochons (without mandrel holes). I think they would look fantastic wrapped in Sterling Silver.

Today I decided to play with ‘intense black’. This stuff is awesome,. and I bought a heap of it because I love the lacey webbing effect it has. Made all five beads in one session at the torch because I was on a roll

Usually 3 beads at a time is my limit because I find lampworking very tiring,.. I seem to get mezmerized or something by the flame and my eyes get very heavy(the same way they do whenever I try to read anything),…don’t want to nod off and burn my nose.

Anyway,.. have a look at the webbing on the top area of the 4th bead along. This is a good example of what intense black does.

I also really played with the torch during these,.altering the amounts of NG and Oxygen to acheive colour reations where I wanted them. An example is the middle bead where the turquoise and red is at the top. The turquoise/red section is actually one turquoise rod,. only part of it was hit with a reducing flame to cause the copper to come to the surface.

Too much fun was had in one evening me thinks :).

Ok,. today was another attempt to encase in clear without cooking the clear and turning it into a carbon filled grey scum layer over the beads.

The first bead was a warmup bead,lol. It is an implosion bead. This bead went through a process of almost turning itself inside-out to get the look of this flower. Love doing these.

The second bead is actually my second attempt at a plunged dot floral. Both of these beads are 16mm and the clear stayed nice and clear. No carbon scum here yaaay!

The orange petal floral was my first attempt at a plunged dot floral. I have not read any instructions how to do these yet and did these the way I thought they were made. This bead is a whopper at 1″ and covered in a carbon scum from letting the clear heat up too much. Oh well,lol.  The white petalled bead is my third attempt at a plunged dot floral and is supposed to be slightly pinkish since the white petals were covered in transparent amethyst. Unfortunately this bead also suffered a roasting,lol and is also covered in a carbon scum layer. The petals looks rather grey in real like *snif*. 

Soooooh it seems that I can avoid cooking the clear when doing small beads,.. but large beads I just cook ‘em. It seems my options are,.. melt mid-flame and get carbon scum,.. melt high in flame and die of old age while waiting for the glass to form it’s nice round shape.  I think I will try again after reading some instructions first, and try and figure out the clear trick.  Clear and I,… we just don’t get along :} .

I have made a few beads this week and have put them up in my journal (Lampwork Journey section)  but I really cannot make any jewellery from my beads yet (unless they are for myself or my children) because they’re not annealed.  I don’t have a kiln yet and haven’t arranged to have any of my beads ‘batch’ annealed by someone else because I don’t really have enough at this point.

Anyway,.this little pendant is for my  9yr old daughter.  She loves the little Koalas that I make, so I thought I’d put one of these little guys on one of my beads,.. if it cracks,.. I just redo.

The two blue beads are the result of a bit of fun mixing several colours. They are more purpley blue in real life and they also have streaks of transparent which looks really cool,. but it doesn’t show as transparent in this pic for some reason. 

The brown and ivory one started it’s life on the mandrel as a snowflake,… was looking good until it started to look bad hee hee,.. so I melted the sucker back down to a regular round and look at the beautiful pattern. There is even a little snowflake pattern in the centres. I should call these melted snowflakes,lol.

Ok,.. these are a bit better I think. I didn’t even think to pay any attention to making sure the dots were all the same size and the blue one really shows that.  The pink one is much better, but I think the next time, they will be even better if I watch my dot sizes. 

I achieved a finer, more lacy look that I was trying for, so I’m really quite happy with how these turned out.

Hmmm,.. what shall I try next?….um..encased plunged dot florals???

I haven’t been able to get in any torch time for a few days,. and was hoping to get to the torch this morning, but three little people had other plans for how I would spend my time today :). So despite being very tired this evening (I promised myself I wouldn’t torch while tired,..very silly thing to do),.I went up to the studio and made these.

This is a first attempt at stacked dots and snowflake style beads. They were heaps of fun to do. The round bead is an imploded snowflake.

I’m very happy with these for my first go at them,…but my brain is now fried. 8]

Well no time for torchin yesterday,.. or today *snif*. Will try and grab some time on it tomorrow if possible.

I bought some mini-orb (mini profile corrogated iron) to put at the back of the workbench,. which looks great because it matches the high pitched roof of our house and it appears to flow right through the wall to outside.  The view out the right of this picture overlooks our large courtyard which is almost enclosed as it is surrounded by 3 1/2 walls.

A second attempt at the Van Gogh flower,.. a lot better,. and I learned a lot between this bead and the last attempt.  I know how to make improvements and will have another crack at it again soon.

At this point in time,. calculated generously, I have had 17hrs in total at the torch.

A second attempt at encasing with clear. Much better,. but still a few small scum patches.
This bead is a big sucker,lol. I mixed my own colours for this one.

Starting the day off with making my first twisties. Too much fun.

This set was a second attempt at implossion beads and a first attempt at encasing with clear. Unfortunately unknowingly, I cooked the snot out of the clear and it turned brown and icky *snif*.

Playing with different colours. I love the topaz and black. It took all my strength to stop myself from popping that round one in my mouth and chomping on it,lol. Mmm mmm delicious creme caramel.

erm…the top one, a piece of chewy I pulled off the sole of my boot ;}. and the other two were made from one of the first twisties. 

This one is suppose to be a Van Gogh style flower phrrrt!