I had the most difficult time getting the focal I made to stay in the package. Mostly because I kept taking it out to keep for myself. I finally managed to let it go.

I am THRILLED to have been one of the lucky ones selected by Jo of Daisychain Jewelry to do the Poppy Challenge to celebrate her 500th blog post. I think these headpins are just darling and I can hardly wait to play with them.

You can download a PDF of this sign in 3 different colors here: http://www.flamingotoes.com/2011/06/some-pinterest-love/

The first involves Pinterest. If you blog, you should be pinning some of your best blog posts. As an example, I always pin any free tutorials I write up. Keep in mind you don’t want to only pin your work. In my opinion it’s like spamming you followers and I’ve actually stopped following people who do that.

Anyway, you can see who has pinned or repinned from your blog by entering the URL:  http://pinterest.com/source/ then adding your blog url after the slash. For example, if I want to see my blog, I would use:  http://pinterest.com/source/glassaddictions.com 

This has some limits if someone pins it from a feedburner or something like that. I found this out because someone pinned a tutorial and it was repinned several times, but didn’t show up in the source link. But at least it gives you a rough idea.

The next tip is twofold. First, if you haven’t seen the Pantone Colors for Spring 2012, here’s what’s supposed to be in this spring:

If you do enameling, Barbara Lewis and her Painting with Fire Team actually came up with a chart of enamel recipes to replicate these spring colors. I can’t imagine how long it took to come up with these recipes, but I will definitely be printing out the chart, taping it by my torch and trying them out.

If you need some of those colors, Barb is having a sale in her Etsy shop through Friday January 27th you get 18% off all enamels (price is already reduced).

Materials and Tools list:
-Hand Dyed Silk Ribbon
-20 or 21 gauge wire (I used sterling, but you can use whatever you want)
-something round approximately 4mm diameter. I used a steel mandrel.
-pendant
-beads, wire, or charms for embellishment and weight

Instructions:

Begin by hand coiling wire on your mandrel. You can work directly off the coil of wire to save materials.  This particular mandrel seems to be the perfect size to allow the ribbon to move easily when tugged, but not to slip on its own.  

Coil until you have about 1/2″ long coil. Cut tail about 3/4″ long.

Begin to spiral the end of wire toward the coil.

Continue until the spiral sits on top of the coil.

Repeat on the other side.

If you will not be attaching your pendant or beads with jump rings, you need to add those to the ribbon now before you add the coil.

Feed one end of the ribbon through the coil.

At this point, make sure the ribbon isn’t twisted in a manner you don’t like. The 2nd end of the ribbon needs to be fed into the coil from the OPPOSITE direction. This is a challenge. To aid me, I grab a piece of scrap wire sitting on my table and use it as a trocar (surgical reference. It’s the only thing I could think of to compare.) to guide it through the coil in the opposite direction without pushing out the other end of ribbon you already fed through the coil.

If you managed feeding both ends correctly through the coil, you just completed the most difficult part!

Now it’s time to embellish the ends. You could just do a knot on each end and call it good, but that’s not as much fun. Also, if you want to wear your necklace short and have the ends dangle in the back, it helps to have them slightly weighted. For this demo I slid a bead on each end then knotted the end.

Here’s the finished product (listed on Etsy if you want to see more photos):

For Lime Blueberry Fizz, I used some scrap sterling silver wire to make some fun spiral zig zag charms and tied them into the knot.

For this Nightmare Insomnia in the Garden Necklace (sold), I added small Hill Tribe flower charms to each end.

Have fun playing with this technique and make sure you show me pics of your creations.

After cleaning and reorganizing the space, I laid out only the tools I use most frequently. The other tools in the pile above are hardly ever used.

Here’s a tour of my 5 favorite lampworking tools (other than my hands, torch and kiln).

Starting from the left side of the photo:

1. is a brass tool given to me by my friend Lisa Atchison several years ago. Her husband makes these and I cannot live without mine. I use it on at least 50% of the beads I make. The end you can see in the photo is perfect for shoving or spreading molten glass where you want it to go. The other end is a point and is what I use to poke holes in glass like the dots in my Nightmare Insomnia series beads below.

2. brass stump shaper. I love this for shaping ends of beads I’ve squeezed into a flattish shape, for mashing the bead into a shape I want other than round, and especially for burnishing metal leaf to the surface of a bead

3. Osibin Lentil Shaper. I love these for getting nicely shaped curved ends, shaping bicone or egg shaped beads.

4. Osibin Curve Shaper. I love this for rolling beads on to try to get them centered and to shape out any lumpy bits I don’t like.

5. Marble Mold. No, I don’t make marbles. And I rarely use this for actual shaping of beads. I mostly like it for measuring the initial footprint of glass when I need to make more than one of a similar bead. It increases my chance of success of actually making the beads the same size.

As a lampworker, it’s very easy to get lured into thinking you need more tools and toys. I have bought lots of tools and then they collect dust because I prefer my simple tools and I prefer using the heat of the torch and gravity to do most of the work for me. The tools above just help me refine what I’m doing.

Unfortunately the party has gotten so big that Lori has had to limit the number of participants to 200 out of the 384 that signed up. Eek! To be fair, I won’t sign up for the next one, so I will be bead soup partying like it’s 1999.

And who do I get to party with? Lucky me it’s the lovely Tania Spivey of Moobie Grace Designs. Before emailing Tania, I read a bit on her blog and also took a look at her etsy shop.

I was immediately struck with her style which leans towards vintage and some pieces with lots of whimsy.

 

She loves to play with polymer clay and told me that her initial foray into polymer clay was a “train wreck” but that once she started to incorporate her love of vintage embroidery into her beads, the rest just “fell into place”.

The intricate work she does in this piece and the addition of the feathers is so gorgeous!

I am totally in awe of Tania's polymer clay beads. This bracelet is only $25...if we weren't on a very tight budget right now, I would snap this up.

Tania loves to take her aggressions out on metal and any material is fair game to be used in her designs. She also dabbles in some steampunk.

Hammered copper pipe used for a bracelet.

Tania loves to use any type of beads except seed beads (I’m with you on that one!) and loves any color. I guess this means Tania will love anything I send…

I adore this sari silk rosette.

This should be really fun trying to come up with a way to challenge Tania and also make it fun for her. Any suggestions?

and:

and:

That I didn’t get past cleaning just that area. People, there were LAYERS of stuff. I took it all apart, cleaned up all the short rods, frit, powders, etc that caked my torch area.

I also tried to organize the rods of glass laying all over my table into something a bit more user friendly (meaning I wouldn’t spend 10 minutes trying to figure out where I laid the rod of clear). I did this by taking old jars and dividing the colors up by red. orange/yellow, green, blue, purple/pink, neutrals (white, clear, ivory, black) and then the glass that contains high concentration of silver and makes the really cool reactions.

Now that my table is so clean and organized, I am scared to use it. Not really. But after spending an entire Saturday on this one small section of my studio, I’m thinking I probably should be better about cleaning up after each torch session or at the very least once a week.

Now I need to carve out some time to tackle the rest of the studio. Wish me luck. The rest is just as bad as the torch area.

Sylvie Lansdowne started writing her Beaded Laughter blog a few weeks ago after being highly amused by Handmade Ryan Gosling. I love to take a Beaded Laughter break each day. When you visit, make sure to read the tags from each post. Some of them are hysterical.

Here are some of my favorites:

Even hubs got a kick out of this one with Johnny Depp (he doesn’t seem to be as amused by hot guys talking about beady stuff as I am):

It leaves EVERYTHING to the imagination. hahaha! Love that.

If you would like to have one of these personalized for you, click here to get more details.

However, this day is going to be AWESOME! My family is doing a day long ski trip. Out the door at 6:15 am, and not scheduled to be back until after 9pm. I have the entire day to myself to do whatever I want. Just the idea of it makes me downright giddy. Because I don’t want to waste one second of this precious day, I got up at 5 am with the family and shoved them very lovingly out the door. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my husband and children. I love spending time with them. And I will miss them while they are gone today. However, I am looking forward to the large chunk of uninterrupted time to myself.

What are the plans? Well…they aren’t particularly glamorous. But they are time consuming. I am one of those that once I start a project, I need to work on it until it is completed and have momentum on my side. Once I stop, all bets are off and the project will probably sit unfinished for weeks, months, years…

Today (after I finish my morning coffee, eat some breakfast and workout) I would like to get my studio in order. All of it. Not just one little section. Not just enough to tolerate working in it. Whenever I try to clean my studio, I am interrupted by something the family needs or wants (dinner? Go eat a bag of chips!) I am also considering getting rid of stuff I never use and will probably never use in the future. I may offer some things here at deep discounts just to clear space and give someone else the opportunity to use and appreciate something I don’t appreciate.

I would also like to get started on my taxes for 2011. It shouldn’t take very long. But I want it finished and in the format the accountant (my darling husband) wants it in early this year instead of last minute.

And if there is time left over (which I doubt), I might make some new beads. Or maybe I’ll read. Or knit. Or make jewelry. Or go see a movie. All I know is if I want to get any of this done, I need to wrap up this blog post. How about some eye candy first though? I actually listed a few new beads on etsy yesterday.