Studio Spring Cleaning

Last week was spring break & I had decided that its time to work at tidying up my studio. At times I tend to work in chaos with tools, beads, glass, supplies, coffee cups and such cluttering up my work area. Although this type of environment works for me at times, I do have that other June Cleaver side that enjoys a tidy work area.

To the left is my studio “Before” photo. A flurry of glass, projects in process and tools. The right side shows the “After” image. A cleaned up, relaxing work space. Nice. Over the summer, I plan a more extensive studio re-do but for now a clean up is all there is time for.

During this cleaning process I came up with a solution to the perpetual bead release mess left behind after removing beads from the mandrels. An old cookie tray! Instead of removing beads from their mandrels on top of my clean table, I remove them on the cookie tray thereby containing the nasty bead release mess to a smaller, easier to clean area. So far this has been a GREAT help to keeping my table clean of residue! How do you keep your work table clean?

Now to the beading side of my studio. This area is almost always disheveled. So, I’ll say up front….I could work on this area more. Here is the “Before” photo

What really helped with my organization on this side are the 2 glass shelves my husband installed for me. The glass shelves work great since they allow light to come thru and things don’t look so dark and closed in. On these shelves I placed most of my knick knacks that amuse me and left my other shelves (located above my bench), for jewelry/bead necessities (a few knick knacks too).

Check out that face bead…..I have treasured Cathy Lybarger’s beads for a long time. This one sits and keeps an eye on me while I work. Along with the glass shelves, magnetic storage containers are great too. They keep those little items off your table and easy to find. Organizing and keeping my work area neat is a constant work in progress. I expect this clean up to last a while!

I hope you will visit my blog at: www.bellabeadjewelrybylinda.blogspot.com , my website at: www.lindasbellabeads.com and my Etsy shop at: www.bellabeadjewelry.etsy.com

Studio Cleanup Miniseries

Are you a frugal beadmaker? I admit it I kind of am. I just hate waste, so I like to make the best use of all my materials. I like to melt my rods down to the last inch or so, so my “shorts” are really short. Short enough that I probably should throw them away, but instead I save them and find uses for them. Sometimes they become frit, sometimes I hold them with pliers, melt them and pull them into stringers or use them to create twisty canes.

When I did my last studio clean up I unearthed a bunch of very short bits of dichro strips; pieces that must have thermal shocked off when they were introduced into the flame. I hated to discard them but they were too small to do much of anything with until I thought a minute and had an idea.

I melted a nice paddle of transparent glass, stuck the piece of dicro on it, heated it up and gave it a twist. Voila’ I had a nice twistie, with the just enough dichro to give the right amount or sparkle to my beads.

I layered my twisties on some transparent beads with some enamels, did a few surface twists and I had a nice little miniseries, all inspired by my desire to not waste my snippets of dichro.

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

Rusty Treasures Redux (aka Ya Finally Get a Pic of a Finished Piece)

Well, recently I showed you a picture of a big rusty treasure hanging out of the bead door of my kiln, but in my usual way of working, I got distracted and zig-zagged back and forth between projects. Yep, I zig and zag between projects, doing a little bit here, getting stuck there, going back to something that’s been waiting on the counter for weeks or months, getting unstuck on that one, forgetting about the current one momentarily. **sigh** It’s what works for me creatively, but it sure does sound inefficient when I write it!

Sometime after I wrapped some ivory glass on the end of that big rusty treasure, I got distracted by the idea of making a glass waterfall of sorts to hang from a different piece of rusty goodness from the junk bucket. Turned out that piece wouldn’t work, but this old hinge ended up making a great backdrop to hold the glass “waterfall”:

This “glassfall” of faces still stymies me creatively. The physical piece of art is one of my favorites, and I am so excited that it might be going to a friend’s new gallery (I’ll get you links to that when she gets online). So, why do I say this piece stymies me creatively? I say that because I had to post the pictures without my usual thoughtful description of the meaning I find in a particular sculpture or bead. Instead, I basically said, “I don’t know how to say what I want to say about this one.”

Zig. Zag. Back to that other project. I wrapped some ivory glass around the bottom of this giant screw/bolt/whoknowswhatitreallyis, then I made a head and a torso to attach to it. Zig. Zag. Had to wait for some suitably “aged” looking wire to be scrounged from the back of hubby’s friend’s old pickup truck. Here’s what I have waiting for me now:

That’s what I’ve got for ya today. Come back next time for, well, for whatever has zigged and zagged its way to a finished project

AngelinaBeadalina enjoys scrounging treasures to use in her sculptures. You can read about it in her blog and see pictures in her BeadArtists.org gallery pages, as well as check out the ones that make it to her Etsy shop.

A Balancing Act

Sometimes I wish I could split myself in two…. sound at all familiar? Artist… Mom… making beads… making jewelry… working on website… writing blogs… It can get overwhelming! When that happens I have a tendency to sit and spin my wheels doing nothing. Not particularly helpful and definitely not productive.

How to balance the different parts of my life? Above all, I need to put my family first…period! Unfortunately, that can put a real damper on being spontaneously creative. So I’m going to keep a notepad with me at all times. Several other members of our blog use one and I think it makes a lot of sense. I can write down a color combo when it pops into my head, outline an idea for my website or blog, sketch an idea for a new piece, check off items on my to-do list, prioritize!

I’m also going to try something new for me beginning next week. School starts and I will have a good six or seven hours of mostly uninterrupted time to devote to my business. So I’m going to set up a schedule and actually stick to it this time!! Instead of poking around in the morning, I’m going to get dressed and treat this like the job it really is. No more procrastinating and avoiding the parts of my business that are difficult for me. It’s time to get busy!

By incorporating these new elements into my daily life, I’m hoping to use the rest of my time being the best mom and wife possible. Sounds balanced… I’ll let you know how it goes!!

Squids and Squid By-Products

All the borosilicate tentacle making from last month’s episode led to two new creatures: Space Squids and Flying Slugs. I’ll discuss the squids first since the slugs were kind of an off shoot of them.

Though the end result may appear silly, creating an entirely new creature requires serious thought not to just the creature’s appearance but my effeciency in creating them and the durability of it’s design.

All I knew when I started out with these guys was that I wanted to create a wearable sculpture, not a solid boro pendant. For durability I decided to make as much of it solid as I could and then be sure to attatch all the tentacles together as much as possible. I would have liked to have the tentacles waving “Hello” and floating out in space but that would compromise the pendant’s durability. I didn’t want a bunch of squid coming back to me in pieces.

Space Squids are composed of a solid head which is made from various frits, powders and clear pyrex crammed into a 1″ marble mold, and tentacles which are made from colored rod or mixed colors encased with heavy wall tubing.

The reptile murrine eye, which I made from a recipe I found in Milon Townsend’s book Advanced Flameworking, has to be encased in clear before applying. I encase pretty much anything that has to be fused to anything else in clear. With the boro I feel that things stick together easier that way. I can’t tell you for sure that that’s a fact it just the way things seem to me.

All of this preparation really adds up time wise. I’ve spent up to two hours on a squid. I create most of my soft glass beads in less than one hour. I’ve spent two hours on a soft glass bead before and the result was a lot less goofy looking than a one-eyed, 5 tentacled squid. So the next thought to cross my mind about these guys was is this design going to be worth all the extra time and gas it will take to make them? I love the squids but they’re goofy. Is anyone else going to want to wear these? That thought was promptly stomped on by another thought about how fun and interesting working with boro was. Coming into the studio to work in the morning was exciting because I didn’t know what was going to happen that day. I decided that I was just going to have to get faster at making the squids. Then everything would be cool.

Here’s a side trip that’s a little OT–My first squid was pretty hideous looking but I wore it proudly. It was durable and it was wearable. Accomplishment! Making that first squid really got my brain going about all the stuff you can make out of this shock resistant glass. That realization side tracked me and I got obsessed with making something bigger out of seperate components. What I wanted was a dainty goblet type vessel out of which guests could drink this horrible Chinese liquor (Moutai)we’ve got lying around at the house. After about 4 days of breaking and fixing various parts I finally did it.

Only the stem and the base and part of the glass are pictured. The whole thing is about 6 or 7″ tall and it incorporates the first squid that I made mostly because that was the only thing I had lying around to make it out of. It’s still intact, which is nothing short of miracle.

But I digress…after making my Moutai glass I got back to Squid making. I was never able to shave a lot of time off of their production so I tried to come up with something simpler–The Flying Slug.