I've been neglecting this weblog way to long, so sorry for that and so let me start to wish anyone who stopped by a happy and most of all healthy new year.

My creative year started with making beads for a bracelet. A special order from my father in law for the birthday of a very special lady... his wife. The colors should be either pink or blue and not to bright but soft-toned and I spend a lot of time finding the perfect match. I made a lot of beads that turned out well but simply not well enough for her.

Since I also have a new burner to heath the glass, I now have the opportunity to work with some more difficult glass, that didn't work for me on the old one because most of the time I burned them.

I started playing around with Rubino/goldruby and EDP because if worked right you can get beautiful patterns using those exact colors. Rubino is a transparent glass with an awsome pink color, burns very easely but because of it's reactions with other colors a wonderful glass to work with. The reaction of the color beneath or on top of the Rubino is a colorconcentration on the inside which results in darker lines or dots. EDP (Evil Defitrifying Purple) is a purple shade with a similar reactions but it's opaque and not transparent. The name is a result from it's nasty habbit to become a uggly rough kind of white if it's worked in and out of the flame too much. Both these colors combined with opaque pink and one of my favorite shades of blue and yellow resulted in beads that exactly matched the idea in my head.

And these are the final pieces of jewelry. A bracelet with a matching necklace made out lampwork beads combined with spacers and closures made out of pure silver and a pink waxed cord for the necklace. I love them and so does my mother in law!

Since I had the flue this week and apart from sleeping a lot the lying in my bed doing absolutely nothing isn't exactly my cup of tea, I spend my awake time making this Beaded Treasure bracelet wich is made with a finger weaving technique.

I'm all in to reactive glass at the moment

A few weeks ago I decided wednesday would be my glass day... well everyday is my glassday at the moment that's how addictive this lampworking is, but on wednesday I warm my kiln so I can make some more complex items.

However sometimes there are those off-days. On those day things go wrong and nothing works as you imagine or planned and it probably is a lot better (and cheaper) to just quit lampworking. Last wednesday I had an off-day like that and among other things that turned out to be a total disaster, I also made these little girls.

Now I know you probably would say what wend wrong here? They look so sweet and not to sound a total smug but I think so too. The problem with these girls is the fact that the beadrelease broke underneath and so know these little girls are attached to the iron which means they cannot leave the mandrel.

So that why they are called mandrelgirls...

Today is wednesday again, my kiln is warming up and I hope this day will be a lot more productive that the last one was.