Week - 06

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.

Week - 05

Another one of Lynette Owen’s dichroic cabs,.. I think I’m addicted to dichroics,lol. This cab is mine,..all mine!!  Can you see it’s a scarab beetle?  I wanted to keep this setting as clean as possible to keep the scarab design.  I wrapped it a little unconventionally,. the prongs, like little beetle’y legs,lol and the bail wires straight down and clean lines ( looks like a tie,lol) .

Hubby  said,…”you’re not going to leave those wires straight down like that are you?”… and confidently I yelled back “YEP! I really like it like that”.   Aaaaand I’ll be the one wearing it so that’s cool,lol.

Week - 04

I  snapped up a couple of  dichroic cabs recently, that I found on Lynette Owen’s website,. I just couldn’t help it,… they were calling out my name :} .   I wanted to play around with some different ways of wrapping too so these cabs were perfect for providing the  inspiration. 

This cabochon has way more purple and pinks through the blue.  I have discovered that there is no way you can capture the true beauty of dichroic glass unless you took a little movie clip and rotated it back and forth. Like opals, looking at these dichroic cabs from different angles you get flashes of different colours that change the whole look.  Sooh pretty.

The setting is made with mostly sterling silver but with gold filled wire wrapped around the neck of the bail, just for something a bit different. The cabochon is actually freeform shaped (more obvious when it was not wrapped) but I decided to treat it like it was symmetrical in the end.

Week - 03

This week I made a fun piece to display a pretty bead that I found in my stash.

It was  made with an Ocean Jasper bead, square sterling silver wire, a few sterling silver beads and took about 30mins to think about what to do, then make it.

Week - 02

Hey,. well just because I have no gas and no oxygen to feed to my torch,. doesn’t mean I can’t still make beads with my glass rods now does it?  ;} 

Week - 01

Here is my week 1 piece for 06/07,  only 51 pieces to go *gasp*.
Unfortunately I cannot take credit for the lampwork bead,. that beauty was made by artist Peter Minson, using a technique I had seen in an online tutorial, which I then described to him and asked if he could show me in real life.  I tried it after he showed me and my efforts where erm,… cwappy by comparison.

The last two beads here were my sad attempts,lol.

Week - 52 YAY another year done!

Wow,..what a year,.. those weeks seemed to keep coming faster and faster… I could barely keep up for most of the year, but I made it *thud*.

Here is my finale piece. My first necklace, made with my own lampwork beads. Whoot!! What a buzz that is.

Week - 51

Ok,. I know I have posted this in the Lampwork Journey category, but it is also my Week 51 FSOJ piece,.. ‘fed two birds with one seed’ (DDs saying, she hates the original saying where you kill two birds with one stone,lol).

Anyway,. it was an absolute blast to make a piece using my own lampwork bead,. whoot! what a buzz. A simple little pendant just so I can wear it myself. This bead is really cool,. it has funky bubbles and organic looking formation inside which is hard to capture in the picture. There is also a deep red in the centre which blooms out on the top and bottom of the bead. All accidental of course, because I had no idea what I was doing apart from including three deliberately trapped air bubbles which worked ok.  The rest of the funky bubbly inclusions I’d guess were created because I worked too hot and boiled the glass,lol.

Week - 50

Using up more scrap,. it was time for a funky though not very practical ring,lol.  Took about 10mins to make and that’s all the time I could spare hee hee. Busy, busy, busy…. has anyone got some time for sale??,… I’m a little short of it and I need to do a bulk buy.

Week - 49

Another busy week, where speed, new earrings for me and use up scrap were the main reasons for these.  Unfortunately the pic makes the wire look a little chewed,. buut the wire is beautifully smooth. WordPress wont allow me to enlarge a photo and constrain the size to keep the proportion correct, so the jaggies creep in grrr. Anyway,. a very simple and quick pair of plain earrings,.. just how I like them for myself.

Week - 48

These weeks are busy for me at the moment,.. because I’m trying to cram too many things in sooh little time,.. so there was three main aims for doing these earrings. 1. speed,  2. use up scrap wire and  3. I need some earrings. :).  Made from little silver-blue coin pearls,. they hang beautifully and look very nice on.

Week - 47

The weeks are flying by and I’m really struggling to keep up with the FSOJ, so another quick piece this week. There was a theme recently called ‘Mixed Media’ and I really wanted to do that but already had a piece planned that week. So I decided to play around with that a little this week. I’ve used a gorgeous little tumbled agate? stone that looks like a little bird egg, some seed beads(for the mother bird ;} ) and sterling silver for the cage (to keep the egg safe =] ) . The necklace, is really quick hard to make out in the pictures, but it is basically two pieces of organza ribbon tied together at intervals then fine sterling silver wrapped loosely around the two ribbons. In the picture(top) the necklace is simply curled around for the photo. So something very different again for me,.. I love getting ‘out of my box’ .

Week - 46

This week’s theme is  “TWISTS AND TURNS”,.. so here is my totally impractical Twist & Turn ring. I had a lot of fun doing this ring. Slightly off the rails,. but that’s what I wanted .

Week - 45

This week’s piece is made from a beautiful Dichroic cabochon, made by Lynette Owen. I’m also currently writing a free tutorial for this design.

Week - 44

This week’s theme is ‘Simmering Summer’ and with that, sometimes comes enormous bushfires. A few years ago we had what was termed ‘Fire Storms’ that threatened our small city(more like a large country town) on several fronts at the same time. It raged through some of our suburbs. 300 houses and many other properties including historic were burnt to the ground and several lives were lost. This pin represents that firestorm racing towards our city through the native gum trees. 

I had a blast doing this piece. It was not meant to be a functional piece of jewelry as such,.but rather a mini sculpture,..an excuse to fiddle around with a few techniques I have been wanting to try for a long time. It is made from copper sheet and wire, and apart from the bird’s eggs it was all made from scrap that I had lying around on my workbench.  I wanted to see if I could cold connect sheet,. so I have a rivet located between the nest and the stem. I deliberately snapped off a bit of the flame so that I could see if I could rivet it back on and was amazed how well it worked. Last piece I made, I LOS’d it, but for whatever reason,. the LOS had a weird dulling effect on the copper and I was really wanting colours like I achieved here. These colours were achieved by holding the piece in the flame on my stove.

I’m enjoying working with sheet,. and one day I might bust out and buy some sterling silver sheet. I really need do buy some proper tools to work with sheet however.