Here is new set I made yesterday. The glass I used for this set goes by funny names like "Leaky Pen"and "Dirty Martini" and I listed the set on Ebay:

I also made another star with the same glass, which is available in my Etsy-shop:

Today my Mystic Ocean beadset was sold on E-bay and I'm happy and sad at the same time. Happy because it's sold for a reasonable price, which means I will have some money left after I subtract costs. Sad because it's certainly one of my most favorite sets of the moment and it will be hard to let go.

My daughter asked me why I list them so quickly and not have them around a bit more. My answer was quite simple. First of all we can use the money and secondly I have this strange deviation, the longer the beads are around the more I see what I don't like about them instead of enjoying the way they look.

Oh and there's also a third reason... I don't like making jewelry myself so why keep them. I find it particullary difficult to come up with a necklace- or braceletdesign. The few times I did make something with my beads resulted in a very long proces. I'm pretty sure that if I'll try more it will probably will get easier but for now I'll stick by the beadmaking.

However if I was into jewelry-designing, wouldn't it be lovely I could make something like this:

Designed by Kerry of Kabs Creative Concepts and I totally love it!

Or maybe something like this:

Designed by Stephanies Sersich

As you can see I like necklaces that make a statement ;)

This morning I opened my kiln knowing a nice set of turguoise beads were waiting there for me. Only when I took them out they turned out to be not as beautiful as I wanted them to be.

Turquoise is a beautiful bright color and I love using it, but turquoise glass also sometimes is difficult to use. It has this very annoying tendency to reduce easely. Which means that the turquoise turns into a somewhat ugly silvery. So although I thought the bead-designs turned out to be very nice the overall beads were almost ugly.

Luckely it's possible to get ride of most of this uglyness by soaking them in Coca Cola of Pepsi, or to use silverpolish. However neighter of both were in my house, so I had to come up with another solution. And as you can see in my before an after picture I did find it...

Using an old toothbrush I cleaned each and every bead that had a spot of uglyness and here's the set looking the way they were supposed to look like:

Last monday I was planning on making my usual round beads using light transparen aqua, sky blue, red and uranium yellow. The last one definately is of my favorites because most of the times it looks like off- white, which I think creates a much more lovely soft combination with a lot of my favorite colors than plain white could ever do.

Ofcourse I also could use ivory instead of white, but ivory has this habbit to create dark outlines when used in combination with some of the blue colors and althought that can be used to your advantage, most of the times I don't prefer it because I like my lines to be "smooth".

Anyway I cleaned out my desk. I prefer to start fresh most of the times, so I restore the rods from the day before, place large stringers in a rack I specially bought for that reason and trash everything that not large enought to be stored, which bye the way isn't that much because I'm a typical dutch girl ;)

And after getting my colors of the day out and lighting my torch, somehow the feeling appeared I didn't want to do rounds. I wanted to play more without planning whatsoever and just see what would come out. Personally I like them a lot, freeformed decorated with some sort of "tentacles", swirls, dots , flowers and ofcourse a few lines every here and there, but most of all a kind of manic ;)

About two years ago I also participated in a christmas ornament swap organised by Amy and I thought it was a lot of fun. Not only she organised the ornament-swap but you also could join in with a christmas ATC swap as well and so I did. I received my ornaments and ATC's in hospital where I was due to a biking accident and that really brighten my day back then.

Last year I didn't participate in any swaps at all, probably because I was too much into lampworking to be interested in swaps that didn't involve glass. But this year I thought it would be nice to do a bit of christmas-swapping again and so I joined in with Amy's ornament and ATC-swap. I'm still working on the ornaments but today I already finished my ATC's:

I also joined the Holiday Ornament Swap from Cake&Pie because one can never have enough handmade ornaments ;)

I started working on an idea I had today, but haven't finished it because it took way too much time. Mind you I have to make a total of 15 ornaments, so I need my ornament to be beautiful and easy to make at the same time. So back to the drawing table it is...