Bead loop dangle lesson

I have recently added the first free lesson to the Beginner Lessons section of the website. Check it out here Bead loop dangle.

I will be doing ear wires next.

Beginner Lessons

I have recently added a new section to the website. This section will contain free jewelry making lessons for beginners. These beginner lessons will all be free, and viewable on site, not via downloadable files. I will be adding new content to this section at every chance I get, however as nice as it would be to have these lessons available for you now, unfortunately I’m very low on time and there is not much I can do about it, so getting these lessons done and uploaded to the website will take a little longer than I would like. I’ll get there though.

Drop by and have a look at the Beginner Lessons section. Please comment and let me know what you think, or suggest some more lessons that would be useful for beginners.

My mother’s pendant

Here is a closeup of her Birthday pendant.

Birthday present for my mother

Here are the little gifts I made for my mother the other day. Happy Birthday Mum!
The pendant is a woven sculture pendant with a large faceted ruby, smaller ruby beads, a garnet bead and swarovski crystals. It is GF wire and is 1.5″ from top of bail to bottom of pendant and 1″ wide. She loves it! Phew!
I also made her this pair of earrings, not matching the pendant though, because I have previously made her a nice pair of garnet & GF earrings that will go very well with the pendant. I love this design of earrings,. it’s a simple/neat design but very stunning IMO. This earring design is something that I would love to wear myself. I am not sure who thought up this design, so if you know who it was, please make a comment and let me know and I will add the designer’s name to this post.

New Rings

It’s been a little while since I’ve had a chance to play with wire,..it’s not that I haven’t wanted to,..it’s simply because other things (like being a mother to three) have taken up all my time. However,. last week.. I decided to organise myself and my messy workbench and I pulled out my pliers and had a blast making these rings.

I’ll post some more pics of these up tomorrow.

Meet ‘Lucky’.

‘Lucky’ crawled out from under the bonet of our car after we travelled 100k. He was a little shabby from the experience and had a couple of little burn marks on his head. He came from the Queensland Hinterlands, but as he was in need of care, we were also not in an area suitable for his release anyway, and because we were continuing our travel home the next morning we decided to buy a travel tank, some crickets and nurse him back to health. We also got advice from wildlife who advise us NOT to release him in an area where he was foreign to. So by default… we had a new pet. We have had him since 2004 and I have to say,… he is very cute. More about him later.

It’s been a while….

It’s been a while since I last posted. I’ve been very busy as usual (being a mother and partner) and I’ve not had much time spare to play with wire or fire :},.. whenever I’ve had a small chunk of time… it’s usually very late at night and I fear that if I were to play with wire or fire that late at night, I’d most likely poke an eye out or burn my head in the flame as I nod off.

Recently however,. things have calmed down here somewhat and I’ve been able to get back into the swing of things. I made a dangle bracelet for my son to give to a friend for her 15th birthday (forgot to snap a photo and only remembered after it was wrapped). I haven’t played with my Bobcat torch again yet… but I visit it now and then up in the studio and fondle the glass rods a bit,lol.

I can’t wait to get back to playing with hot gooey glass on a rod again. I need to find myself an affordable annealing kiln first, because I cannot help myself,.. I just have to make those big fancy beads (I’m a wannabe fancy lampwork bead maker hee hee) and they will just crack in half if I don’t anneal them in a kiln. So,.. I’m looking for a kiln,..but not looking too hard…these things are expensive and I don’t really want to find a kiln that I might love,..and I cannot not get it,. and it will cost me and arm and a leg.

In the mean time,… most of my free time is spent upgrading (read re-coding) my website. Ok,..I feel the perfectionism has crept in and is holding me hostage in XHTML and CSS code, validating it and removing errors. Oh but wait… what’s this for a change,… I have upgraded and made some changes to this blog today and aaaaaaar it’s PHP. So anyway,.. I’m still working on the first three pages I started a week ago,lol but am almost done with the home page. It’s looking good,..(and I mean the code is looking good) and working well in several browsers. The other two pages that I have started on already,.still have a tonne of recoding and validating to do, and look a little untidy in the browsers as the links and texts have lost their uniformity etc and I have to go back into those pages once the conversions a complete and fix up that uniformity again. I have a long way to go, to convert the rest of the website from HTML to XHTML and CSS, but I think just knowing what I do now,.. the rest of the pages will be easier and quicker.