Chaos and Creativity

Look at this! My torch station, actually clean! I suppose I should have taken a picture of my normal chaos, but I didn’t think to do that. Oh well, it may have been too frightening anyway! Every time I clean my workbench I swear, cross my heart and hope to die, pinky promise, that I will start working neatly.

You know, actually planning what I want to work on ahead of time. Taking out just those colors I plan to work on, pulling stingers and making canes, then making those carefully planned beads. When I’m finished, I’ll put away my rods, and wipe off my work station, so I can have a clean start for my next torch session.

I’ve just described the dream world in my head. My reality is that I often have a plan for a bead, I start to create it, then something goes awry; I misplace a dot or mess up with a stringer, then my bead takes on a new life and becomes something I never meant it to be. Sometimes these “mistake creations” give me great new ideas for future beads or end up being serendipitously wonderful! (And sometimes they end up being, well, UGLY!) So despite my plans I end up working on something totally different.

But what about that apre torch clean up? Somehow that rarely happens. Most of my torch sessions are at night, and I when I peek at the clock and see it’s midnight, and I know I have to be up early for work the next day, I loose my inspiration to clean. So much for my great intentions to actually clean after each session. Of course I could clean before starting, but I’m usually too excited to get working to actually clean. The torch usually wins over the dustpan! And so it goes, until the point where my workbench becomes a glass littered wreck, and then the chaos starts to get to me. I then begin telling myself that I MUST clean before torching, but I still don’t actually do it. Soon I start stressing out about the mess, and at some point it starts to zap my creativity. Sometimes it causes me to avoid my studio, because I know I really need to clean, and I just don’t want to do it, because it’s become such a big job. I hit this point last week. I realized my studio was causing me more anxiety than happiness, to the point where I was avoiding making beads. So I kicked myself in the rear and spent a large chunk of my weekend in cleaning mode. I feel so much better now that I have a usable work surface again! I’m looking forward to resuming torching. The burning question is “Will I mend my evil ways and start cleaning after every session?” I have such good intentions, but suspect I will fail once again. But you never know. Hopefully I will take advantage of my creativity before my world turns to utter chaos again. I will keep you posted!

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!

Evolutionary Ends

Are you sick of my writing about my travels with twisties? I think I may have hit the end of my evolutionary road. I started playing out playing with reactive twisties, which led me to my “Ornamentive” beads, then on to playing with gravity to carefully stretch and move the twisted glass down the bead.

This weeks beads are a bit more of the same, but rather than trying to precisely control the movement of the glass, I allowed it to flow more randomly. When doing the final shaping of these beads I chose to make a tube shape, because I thought a structured geometric shape would add balance to the more flowing, informal nature of patterned part of these beads.

I think these are my favorite twisty beads, they really appeal to my organic side. Because of the columnar shape of these beads I’ve dubbed them my Monolith series. Series? Me? Well, I have made at 8 or 10 of these, which for me constituted a series!

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!

Twisty Evolution Continues….

If you’ve been following my posts here, you read a while back that I started playing with reactive twisties, which evolved into my “Ornamentive” beads.  The next step my B.A.D.D. (bead attention disorder) created in my bead evolution brought out a bit of the mad scientist in me. Instead of dressing up my twisty beads with carefully placed dots and twists I decided to add a little physics to my work and play around with using heat and gravity to move my twisties about.

These beads are quite challenging for me, getting the glass to all move at the same rate in straight lines with out distorting the pattern is a very good exercise in heat control. Keeping the design in the glass when I do my final bead shaping can be challenging as well.

Of course I don’t always succeed in my mission to control the molten glass, and that leads me to further change my designs. And you know, that’s beauty of melting glass - It’s all good!!!

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!

Evolution of a Style

Being the A.D.D. type, I tend to leapfrog from style to style pretty quickly, with one thing leading to another and another. I actually like to call my disorder B.A.D.D., for Bead Attention Deficit Disorder. Being afflicted with B.A.D.D. is the reason I tend to make focals and not sets. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, there is no cure for B.A.D.D., I simply have to allow my creative muse wander as she wills.

I recently posted about about being enticed into playing with a “standard” type of reactive twisty. I had fun playing with that for a few session, then decided it was time to move on to using my expanding twisties into a more refined design, so I started playing with new shapes. I’ve been calling these beads my “Ornamentives” as, to me at least the shapes remind me of small ornaments. I like the way the twisty imparts a bit of an organic feel to beads with an otherwise more formal and ornate design.

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!

Clothespin Beads???

So what do you think of this bead shape?

I love to make them, but I’m not exactly sure it’s a shape that other people really like. I’d like to change that, so I plan to keep making them, and hopefully others will come like them as well.

Beadmaking is a creative outlet and stress reliever for me. Because of this I tend to make what makes me happy regardless of what’s in style or what’s currently selling on ebay. Perhaps this doesn’t make me a great art business person (read: I’d better keep my day job!), but it does give me a great deal of personal pleasure.

For some reason unknown to me, I tend to gravitate to making slender long shapes; perhaps my beads emulate shapes I wish I was - LOL. Asymmetry really appeals to me too, perhaps that’s another reason I like this shape so well.

I keep thinking that I need a name for this bead shape. While it’s a long bead, it’s not really a bicone, and it’s not a tube. I’ve heard people use the term “urn shaped”, but in my mind “urns” are shorter and squatier. It’s a bit more vase shaped, but that term doesn’t seem quite right to me either. Amphora is such a wonderful word, but I like to use it for items that are truly vessels.

I recently posted one of these beads on an internet forum and posed the “what should I call it” question. The answer I received from several people was “clothespin” shaped. You know, those old fashioned, springless wooden clothespins. I can certainly see the similarity, but I’m not exactly sure I want to bill my creations as “clothespin beads”.

I know I haven’t really made an effort to bring much marketing savvy to my work, but even I can see that’s not really the direction I want go. So I’m looking for ideas. What should I call this bead shape?

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!