Sneak Peek - Saturday Update

I thought you'd like to see what came out of my kiln over the past week.  Lotsa new beads.  Some smashed.  Most round and swirly.  Two worry stones.  Two buttons.  One focal.

I am so thankful tomorrow is Friday.  And that we're having such fabulously warm weather.

Pop over to Studio Waterstone and on her FSS (Featuring Studio Spaces) series you will see my interview and lots of pics of my studio.

Tomorrow, I will show you close-ups of all the new bead sets going into my shop this Saturday.  TGIF tomorrow!

My Saturday

My Mom asked to have the kids spend the night and a day with her for spoiling....so we drove them up after work yesterday and dropped them off. Todd and I went out for a quiet dinner by ourselves before coming home to watch the Twins game. We woke up early because he had to be out of the house by 8am to prepare for a tennis match (Todd is the captain and had to make sure the courts were dry/squeegeed and drinks/snacks were set up).

Good morning, my torch! This is where my kiln normally sits, so I have to wheel the filing cabinet into my desk area and bring my chair out to the torch table.

I had absolutely no mandrels ready, so I had to mix up new mud and dip over 60 mandrels.

I love my little wire decorations. They make me happy.

There are more of these available on Etsy here.

I also married a couple dozen rods of clear.

This was the kiln before I left the studio to go watch Todd win his tennis match.

When we left the house at 3:30, the kiln was pushed to the next cycle to soak the beads at a constant 940 degrees for one hour before slowly ramping down in temperature. She was filled with a whopping FIFTY EIGHT beads!

I got to see them all tonight before coming upstairs to go to bed. I'm really happy with how they turned out. I made two dozen new egg beads on 1/16th mandrels. The rest are all rounds on 3/32 mandrels, but new color combinations that I haven't tried before. I'm excited to take pics tomorrow to show you.

Not so excited to clean them all. It will take me 1.5-2 hours to remove all the beads and clean out their holes with my dremel. Anyone want to come over to help? :)

It was a very relaxing day (yes, a nice little nap was inserted in the middle of the afternoon between torch sessions) making beads and watching my honeys play tennis. Twas a much appreciated break from parental responsibilities.

Thanks Mom!!!!

I do it all.....all by myself

No helpers or magical elves. Not even any child labor (yet! they're still a little too young to do anything other than request certain color combinations, shapes or designs).

I dip the mandrels. I melt the glass. I wind the beads onto the mandrels. I stick them in the kiln. I take them out the next morning. I twist and tug and pull the beads off the mandrels. I grind my teeth and then twist and tug and pull some more. I clean them out with my speedy dremel. I take the pics with my digital camera and then crop & edit each pic. And then I list them in my Etsy shop. All for your viewing and buying pleasure.

I'm not complaining. This. Is. What. I. LOVE. To. Do. :)

And this is where it happens. My studio; that I love so much and that I moved into in Sept 2008 after spending several summers sweating buckets and winters freezing under multiple layers of clothes & goose-down comforters in the garage. My Mega-Minor Burner torch is at the workstation closest to the window on the left, which is also closest to my fan/ventilation hidden behind the green square box on the wall. I have a second Minor Burner torch at the work station on the right. An oxygen concentrator is tucked away in the footspace under each torch station. And hoses run from the torches through the wall to my backyard where the propane tank is housed safely outside.

I've got great overhead lighting mounted under the top cabinets so I can see what I'm doing at the torch. Sooooo much better than the dismal lighting I had in the garage! Mandrels are standing upright in that wooden block in the center of the counterspace.

Here is my glass cabinet. Front, center & easy to reach for a midget like me....it's the floor cabinet so no tip-toe reaching or counter climbing to get to the most important stuff! Bottom shelf has German glass, filigrana (clear rods with cores of color shooting through the middle) and stringers (really thin rods of glass). First shelf up from the bottom is strictly transparent rods of Italian glass. Second shelf up is nothing but opaque rods of Italian glass. Next shelf is more German glass. And the top shelf which you can barely see is filled with soft glass from China. So many colors and not enough time to play & create! Special pliers & smashers hang from the insides of the doors.

Here is a more current view of part of my workstation. Glass rods still on the counter from my last glass shipment that either haven't found a home yet in the glass cab or I'm still playing with the cool new colors. Like the Elphaba greens :) Little jars are on the back shelf, filled with all kinds of frit combinations. Rods of either half-used glass of unknown colors or 'cool' bonus colors stand upright in jars next to my large mandrels, a color wheel, the Southern Flames 2008 postcard, the necklace I won at our beadswap meeting hangs from my torch deflector. And my iPod nano & docking station Todd got me for my birthday....very important to have good tunes for jammin at the torch :)
And a view into one upper cabinet that is organized enough to share. Mostly shipping supplies where they are nicely stacked, but normally out-of-sight when the doors are shut.

I really can not thank my husband enough for supporting my fire-playing hobby and being super-cool about me moving my studio inside the house. Of course, there was a perk in it for him....for the first time since we moved into this house in 2005, he can now park his car in the garage. That alone may have been worth the cost of constructing my studio for him :)

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.

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. :)