New piece

I have a new piece Im quite pleased with. It is, for me at least, a bit epic. Its inspired by the work of the lovely Sarah of Flame Force Five who makes amazing necklaces with lots of beautiful round beads like this one on her flickr. Im pretty sure this is the biggest set of beads that I have ever made and I had to do it in more than one sitting but I am pleased with how its come out.



So what do you think ?

Ear Bobs are Back

Technically, they did not actually go away I just havent had very many of them recently ! I have expanded the selection of designs and I have decided to put all the ready made Bobs onto Etsy (see the link on the right). I will still be doing made to order bobs via my website and if you dont have an Etsy account or would rather buy the ready mades through my Chameleon Designs website just shout and I will list them there for you.



I have 2 new styles of Bobs for you, "Sparkle" ear bobs, taken from my galactic beads are shimmery sparkly little babies that are just so, well, pretty. They are great for dressing up without the weight of long earrings (especially good if it is going to be a long night out and, like me, your ears start to protest after a few hours) but they are subtle enough to be great everyday earrings too. Can you tell I love mine and have been wearing them all week ? In the name of product testing of course !



The second new style are "Dazzle" ear bobs made with encased palladium leaf to give a little razzle dazzle but without being mega blingy. Both styles are available in a variety of colours.

I got an Etsy Treasury

Im so impressed, I was actually online at the right time and then ..everything went a bit funny so I thought I had lost it but a lovely lady sent me a message to say that I did get it and here it is, a selection of work from the FHFteam on etsy in soft muted colours. If you want to see some more of the work from this collection of glass and jewellery artist search using "fhfteam"



Winter Wonderland Treasury

PMC level 1

I spent the last few days at the PMC Studio in Amersham doing a PMC level 1 course, some of you may remember I won the Beads and Beyond PMC competition back in July and my prize was this certification course. I had a great time and expanded my knowledge of working with the silver clay and I got to chat to some lovely ladies who were also on the course. So now for the pictures of what I made as I know that is what you are really interested in :o)

Im going to share pictures roughly in the order that the pieces were made, so to start off with the first piece was to be made by taking a mould from something and to make a piece that included a fireable gemstone. I chose a cute little kitty button to work with and below you can see a picture of the button and the fired pendant which has a marquise cz nose !



a little polishing later (Sorry I know you can see me in the reflection, bit of a eek to photo is this one) -



Im thinking I will oxidise it a little to try and bring out a little of the detail a bit more, if I do I'll share a photo of how he turns out. The next task was to make a "dry construction" bead I loved this bit which involved cutting the shapes of clay you want drying them over a former to dome them and then putting them together and getting the piece all sanded and lovely and ready to be fired, definitely a task to indulge in for those who are a little anal about things (like me, there, I said it before anyone else can !) My piece was quite simple, a different leaf print on each side and the rest left plain, the plain got the high shine treatment (think lots of elbow grease with the burnisher) and the leaves I left as brushed to give contrast.



Next we got to work on making textured band rings which was an interesting excersize for me too, having not made a ring in clay before. I chose a texture that could be fun to add some resin to, to give it a bit of colour so once I have finished polishing it (it has only had a tumble so far) I'll have a play and let you know how i get on.



We started to really multi task at this point as there were several bits that needed to be started and then left in order to dry so we worked on a piece with wood clay where you make a shape and then paint it with the pmc in order to leave you with a hollow form when it is fired and we needed to work on our leaves. So in no particular order, I give you my painted geranium leaf -



and my hollow formed House, decorated with paper clay tiles, I couldnt decide whether to make a house, a barn a bird house of where to go so its sort of a "rustic dwelling" lol -



We did a pmc set glass pendant with some dichro, not my best piece by far but interesting to do -



And last but not least we made a 2 part clasp with PMC and fine silver wire, I decided on a sea theme in the end as I know I have some findings somewhere that might go quite nicely ...



So there you have it the products of all my hard work :o) looking forward to playing more with the clay soon and finishing some of the projects I have had on the go for a while now !

Its all go ...

Its been a busy busy week not least because I started a new job on Monday ! So I have been dashing around the house each morning getting ready and then contending with the wonders of the uk train system. I am not a natural commuter, I do not like crowds and confined spaces (...hmm I hear you ask, why then did you take a job in London ?? ) but I have managed to find a slightly quieter route which only gets horribly busy for the last 3 or 4 stations near london so I have not been completely tearing my hair out !! I have discovered getting home again can be a big of a chore depending on which connections I catch or miss but hopefully I will fathom that out eventually.



The skitties are most befuddled by it all having become used to me being at home since I finished uni they have gone from sulking and totally ignoring me (Monday night) to now being mega cuddly as you can see from the gratuitous picture of his cuteness above.



As for things of a beady and glassy nature well I have quite a bit of news to share,so Im going to spread it out a bit over a few days so I dont write war and peace and bore you ! So for today pictures of the rest of my charm collection - Initials !! Im really pleased with these and have decided on 3 styles to start off with, the two shown above are "Deco" which as the name suggests is art deco style uppercase letters which are available with or without colour (shown in Aqua), and "Type" based on old fashioned typewriter keys, again available with or without colour. Below is the third option "Romance", almost Art Nouveau style uppercase letters, the one shown is mine as I'm sure you guessed and has been brush finished for a satiny look.



Ok thats it for today, there will be more to follow soon, with pictures of more new things I will have available shortly !

Into orbit - galactic beads online now

In this months issue (Issue 7) of Making Jewellery I have a step by step project to make the pendant and earrings below. Pretty and elegant and suitable for both dressing up jeans and casuals or taking centre stage with a little black dress.



These beads have a lovely shimmery sparkle to them that I just love they make me feel like christmas is coming and its time to get a-making some pretties for the party season, so I have made some more for you and they are online now HERE.









Id love to see what you make with these so if anyone wants to share pictures when they have made pieces I will post them here so we can all see.

Charmed Im sure

I have something new to share with you today, good job really after I have been away for sooo long !! I am very excited about these though, I have been busy making charms ! These are suitable to go on the european bracelet systems such as Pandora and Trollbeads and are lovely little dangles style charms.



These are dream cloud, wish upon a star, and one of two options of finger print charm. The Dream Cloud charm is show below has sparkly aqua colour that is, well, dreamy. It has DREAM written in the silver which shows through the transparent sparkly colour.



Wish upon a Star is my favorite, Im really pleased with it and will be keeping this first one for myself ! This one has a pale blue sparkly colour through which you can see the "wish" that I wrote in the silver.



The finger print charms I was a little conflicted about as there are quite a lot of finger print things available and I wanted something different. So I went with the finger print as a pattern in the piece rather than as an obvious finger-print-pushed-into-the-piece and I thought it could use a little colour so I added a little sparkle colour in purple. I did a simple uncoloured option too as I know some people love silver pure and simple !



I will be able to do these in your choice of colour, from the sparkle colours shown or from a huge variety of non sparkly colours.

These are the first ones, I have some more designs I am even more excited about but I need to keep those under my hat for a few days yet so look out for another post about those soon !!