Merry Christmas Eve!

Check out Chloe attired in her Christmas spirit.  You may be able to tell she dressed herself and was completely thrilled with her Santa hat, Christmas shirt under the denim jumper, plaid skirt and argyle tights combination.  Always a treat and a surprise to see how she dresses herself :)  

This is before going to an Ugly Christmas Sweater Party.  Todd picked up the sweaters from Goodwill, but his needed to be modified into a neck-less, sleeveless atrocity.  My Dad was over that day and he saw nothing wrong with either sweater....he thought mine was very nice.

I am LOVING these beads and had fun stringing them into a floating necklace.  The base bead is made out of a dark Elphaba green (which I just got and absolutely LOVE) and then is swirled in Smoke Rings.  LOVE LOVE LOVE these and will probably make more!  Taking a chance the recipient won't be on the internet today, but I just had to share a pic of this

It was two days ago when I got the frantic call from a good friend with his daughter asking "Can you please please please make my Mommy a necklace with green, blue and purple beads for Christmas?"  I really like how the colors swirled together and there is great veining going on in the greens that I used in each bead.  And the purple was fun because it reacted great with the other colors to form different shades and separations.  I hope Mommy loves it :)

Trunk Show on Saturday

I am excited about this Saturday and showing off many of my new pieces of jewelry.  I have been working hard over the past month to create many new items with different sets of beads.  Many new colors and designs!  Cassie has added several collections to her inventory and will be displaying those as well.  Come to our trunk show on Saturday and mention this blog to get 15% off any one item of your choosing from my shop!

Jewelry Trunk Show on Saturday!

So I know quite a few of you have been wanting to see the new copper stand I made last week with my new blow torch. Here it is. I'm very pleased with how it turned out! It will hold either a TON of earrings or loose beads. Wendy was very nervous about me drilling holes on the insides of the vertical side bars because the drill bit slipped off a couple (ok, several) times and gravitated towards my left palm. She was making all kinds of snide remarks about tetanus shots and missing work so she could drive me to the ER. But I persisted without heeding her safety warnings or alternative suggestions for holding the stand while drilling. I only nicked my palm once and now you can barely even tell that the drill bit went through my hand! But doesn't it look cool? And with the other stands, too. Very pleased with my Tool Man Tim efforts :)

And then I had fun making gift boxes out of scrapbook paper, which really didn't take me terribly long to cut and fold up. But they look pretty spiffy, too. Betting these won't last past this Saturday at our trunk show on the 13th at my house!

And check out Cassie's great set up at our show last Saturday! I kept telling her everything on her table felt so calm and zen. Her pieces are simple and elegant.

Torch & Jewelry GNO, or rather GNI

Wendy came over last night with cake mix & icing (God bless her for saving me so I could make a birthday cake in time for my Mom!) and 2-bite brownies.  I'd be willing to take the 3.5-4 hours to make the Italian Cream Cake (on a weekend, of course) for Mom, but she just wants the yellow cake box mix with chocolate icing.  So that's what I made while helping Wendy eat the brownies.  I think Betty Crocker should double the size of the box mix so you can make two pans and still slurp up half the mix, but I had to settle for whisk drippings.  Once the pans were in the oven, we headed to the studio.  Happy Birthday Mom!  I hope you had a great day and I enjoyed cooking dinner for you tonight!!!

Wendy fired up the torch and made a ton of beads in three hours while I strung up jewelry.

I like floating necklaces and with the mini-crimps (yes, even those are sterling silver), they are much easier to make.  The Swarovski crystals I used have an AB finish, so they have that cool metallic glint which blends right in with the special Striking Color glass I used to make the dots on the black beads.  I LOVE how this glass reacts and changes into so many different colors after I have heated and cooled it a dozen times before putting the beads in th

e kiln.  I also made some matching earrings.

Then I made this necklace with a bunch of different really cool seed beads I bought at the bead shows in Tucson last February.  My beads in this necklace also use the same Striking Color 

glass (Brad Shute makes this by hand and it has a lot of silver in the recipe, which causes these great reactions!), but just wrapped

clear base beads.  I heated and cooled these beads many more times than the black ones above, which is why they are creamier, with more ambers and gorgeous green.  

It also has a really cool square toggle clasp that I don't think I have used before now.

And lastly is a pic of the updated hair cut.  I was ready for a change, so before showering yesterday I put my hair in a ponytail and cut off around 6-7 inches.  Afterwards, I got Todd to hold my hand mirror so I could see the back better to shape/stack it up.  

I'm pleased with how it turned out and have received compliments that it doesn't look like I cut my own hair, so that was positive.  It is just long enough to tuck behind my ears.  

Three words for this winter:  Need.  More. Scarves.

I bought a new torch!

It is a little propane torch for soldering and I tried my hand at it for the first time.  I realized that I need more workroom space and that the garage is better than my glass studio for this.  When I saw Lorelei's stand that her husband made her, I knew that this was a great idea and I needed to try it out for myself.  I made one a foot tall for necklaces and another 6 inches tall for bracelets.  I'm so excited!  I will be able to use these next Saturday at Cas's house when we have a jewelry party and then again at my house the following Saturday.  :)

Thanksgiving was an excellent day of relaxation, hanging out with my family 

(we were several important people short this year so I didn't have to cook as much....which freed up more hours to just hang out with my Mom & Grandma, look at the sales ads and sneak a nap before dinner!)  Chloe was my right hand at preparing all the dishes Thursday morning...she even made the green bean casserole all by herself!  

I had typed a TON more, but blogger is not behaving and I'm too tired to keep re-typing since I've figured out it doesn't like for me to copy/paste within this Creation Post spot.  I'll try updating later this week, along with a pic of our Christmas spirit and all the windows bedecked in wreathes as of this afternoon.  Check out pics below of beads just waiting to be strung up!

Playing with Fire

Very happy the work day is over with and I was able to move on to the business of being a family. An escalation came in just after 5pm (of course!), so we ended up getting Chloe late from school. But we went out for Mexican and it was absolutely delicious....chips/salsa, margaritas, carne asada and the kids behaved as good as angels (I LOVE it when they do that!). After dinner, we rewarded the kids with movie night and Kung Fu Panda (I have absolutely no desire to watch this and don't want to know why/how it held the attention of my 6 year old the entire time) and Todd ran up to the tennis courts to watch his mixed doubles team play. I met him up there, but too late to see his teammates mop up on the other team. However, I did get to hang out with the guys and enjoy a mug of bailey's & coffee to keep warm. Then back home to get the kids in bed and fire up the torch. I finished one order for big-hole beads and then moved on to playing with Brad's glass again and keeping Wendy's standard operating procedure in mind....the more time in the flame the better. I think I pulled out more creams, blues and greens tonight, but I'll find out for sure in the morning.

I've been wanting to show you how I melt glass, but the video I have is a little too big. So until I make a newer/smaller video, click here to see it on my other website. And here to watch an awesome video of Chloe falling asleep while eating strawberries when she was still just a little bean.

Getting my feet wet in blogging

I'm slowly learning how to move around in this; waiting on the learning curve to speed up! I'm not quite sure why it wouldn't let Marcy leave a comment....I checked all the options and everything shows people should be able to leave comments if they're so inclined. I even removed the CAPTCHA word verification pita. Please email me at kelleysbeadstudio@mac.com if you try to leave comments and experience problems.

In the meantime, between now and the end of the year, I'm weighing the pros & cons of blogspot. Is it better/easier/faster/more/better than my website hosted by Mac and that sucks in a Ben Franklin at the start of every year? I don't know, but I want to explore my options and determine if less is more. Let me know what you think because I feel the onset of butterflies in my stomach thinking about giving up all my pages of pictures. Not that I feel the need to show off all of my work, but that all of the pics remind me of how far I have come and just how much I have really made over the past few years.


Last night I went to the Southern Flames meeting and because I was late counting (and recounting) my beads to give to Beads of Courage, I missed dinner. But it was so worth not eating. First, Robert Simmons did a demo on making glow-in-the-dark beads that are given to the kids who have completed radiation treatments. And then Brad Shute made a coupla beads from the silver glass he makes in the furnace on his front porch. The colors coming out of the glass were FaNtAsTiC! Brad brought a whole box of different batches of his StrikingColor glass to sell. Wendy and I pooled our backpocket cash and bought a half pound. If only we had known to bring more cash! Wendy made the pretty barrel beads and some incredible purples showed up. And I made all the little nugget beads.

I handed over a bag of 260 of my beads to donate to the Beads of Courage program and then we ran out the door and back to my house to fire up the torches. Wendy made close to a dozen barrel beads and I made almost 30 nugget beads with our new StrikingColor glass. To bring out the colors, we had to strike the glass/beads (pulling the mandrel out of the flame for the bead to cool down & lose the glow before re-introducing to the flame again, then repeating over & over). Wendy did this to the max, as she is prone to do because that's what she's good at. Her beads brought out some beautiful purples and other creamy colors. I struck my beads only once or twice and stopped when I thought I was getting ahead because I was seeing these incredible blues and greens. But this morning when I ran down to my kiln like a kid on Christmas, I found that ALL of my nuggets were brown and amber, with just a smidge of greens & blues around the holes. Now these browns and ambers are very pretty and I can't wait to string them up into a new set of jewelry. But it was a little disappointing not seeing a whole batch of green and blue beads when I lifted the lid to my kiln. Obviously an operator assumption gone bad, so I made a note to self to strike the heck out of future beads and like Wendy, I might find some colors other than brown and amber. Also, her encased beads had more vibrant colors, so encasing is on my mental To Do list for my next night at the torch.

Cas and I have set a date of December 6th to host a jewelry party at her home. She's creating the fliers to put out in her neighborhood the week before. We still need to decide on a date to host another party at my home because we're on different sides of the city and want to try to make more new friends & customers. I'm excited, but I need to make new displays. All of my current displays are wire and take up less than a square foot of space. I want something longer and taller that will allow ALL of my necklaces to hang together and with plenty of space in between. Since I LOVE to build things and work with my hands....I'm debating between building a stand with wood or using pipes from the plumbing section at Home Depot. Leaning towards the plumbing section because the pipes and connectors have always worked well as poles and stands for my birdhouses in the backyard. And plumbing would be a lot less precision work on measuring and cutting. We'll see. I need to scope out the plumbing section and see what they have in stock or go for a couple of cool ballisters with a dowel in between.

Thank goodness tomorrow is Friday! I'm ready for the week to be over because I'll be that much closer to having reports done for work, the kitchen mess/mail counter cleaned up and the long Thanksgiving four day weekend is just around the corner. Chloe has her swim lesson Saturday morning and Todd will likely be playing in a tennis match. Cas and I are going to a bead show in Gwinnett in the afternoon (I really need more SS crimp clasps for leather cords!) and then we have a couple of parties to go to in the evening. Sunday is another busy day of beads (Wendy and I are going to a Beads of Courage event where we have a two hour window to sit at a torch and play with free glass to make radiation and other beads for the kids!) and then a belated birthday celebration with my Mom & Grandma.....because last weekend I was in Peachtree City watching Todd play in the USTA state championships. I can't wait because Mom is making me my favorite Mississippi Mud Cake. I LOVE that cake....I look forward to it all year!

Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

So this is my entry into the real world of blogging. I have maintained a blog/journal on my www.kelleysbeads.com website, but I haven't been very diligent in keeping up the website since this summer when work got out-of-control crazy hectic and then a forced hiatus from my torch when my studio moved inside the house from the garage.

And now I'm having problems with my website updating correctly. And as much as I'd like to say it's not Apple because I LOVE my macs, I think it's Apple and not me. I add new pics, text and videos to the website, but it is just not publishing all of it correctly. I'll be calling my friend Cas for help on making my blogspot page look pretty. :)