London Glassblowing Opening and Christmas Event

Tomorrow is THE BIG DAY. The new London Glassblowing Workshop and Glass Art Gallery are finally opening to the public. There has been a huge amount of work gone into the move to the new premises and it looks great, and there is now a shop frontage for the gallery with a huge glass entranceway that not only lets in lots of light but offers passers by tantalising glimpses into the gallery and hot shop !!!

Why I hear you ask are you telling me this ? Well, one because I have been involved in helping with the aforementioned huge amount of work which is why you haven’t been able to see as much stuff as usual on my website. And two because I have a small selection of my work on display in the gallery, for sale, for the duration of the event !



If you can make it along between 27th November and 6th December, the grand opening is being combined with the annual Christmas open house sale so there are some great bargins to be had with some very attractive prices on the art glass pieces in the sale (not to mention the opportunity to see my pretties in the flesh) and its open daily from 11am to 5pm with late nights next week too (more info on their website) I am not demoing this time but I will be there over the weekend this weekend and Thursday to Saturday next week. I forgot to take my camera with me today so the pictures of my work were from my phone (sorry !!) but I will get some pictures to share with you when I go in on Saturday. I would love to say hi to anyone who can make it so if you can come along do please come and introduce yourself !!

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 !