Well finally I found the time to write a litlle bit about what is going on around here.

After such a long "summerbreak" lampworking in my new studio didn't go as smooth as I thought it would go.

First of all the colorcombinations...my normal routine is to choose a set of glassrods (opaque and transparent) in colors I think will make a lovely combination. After that I start pulling stringers, twisties and sometimes I will also make murrini's and when I've finished all that I finally start making the beads. However the first couple of days the colors I choose didn't seem to work at all together. The beads turned out totally dull or even plain ugly.

Secondly my skills. I almost felt like starting all over again, I had to reinvent the hole stringer/twisty-routine again, wasn't able to make some kind of beadset.

So after two days I started getting a bit grumpy and started thinking about what I was doing wrong and why thinks didn't work out. My conclusion was that since I wasn't able to light my torch for a long time, but in the meantime did see a lot of lovely and inspiring lampwork on the internet, too many ideas and techniques were stored in my head which resulted in blocking my creative fun. So the next day I allowed myself to just play and connect with the glass again. I didn't plan something, just grabbed some black and whiteglassrods and some of my favorite blues and greens and started pulling stringers and placing dots.

Apparently that did the trick because that day I made this:

And since that I made these:

The first set I sold already and the last two are on Ebay at the moment.