Autumn

Gosh, nearly a month since I last blogged !!! What a bad blogger I am !

It has been a very busy few weeks, we have been to Barcelona (wonderful, I love Barcelona, the weather was amazing and we indulged in lots of spanish hot chocolate. Heaven.) I have started teaching a glass after school club locally and last weekend I gave my very first lampworking class !

I wont bore you with hundreds of photos of Barcelona, (and as usual there are 100's !!) but will sum up by saying I took lots of photos of patterns -

Sampled lots of cake shops -

And got quite addicted to a new iPhone photo app that takes interesting panoramas -

My class last weekend was hosted at Fire Works studio in Bristol by the lovely Georgina Black and her husband. They were great and made everything run smoothly and trouble free and John even cooked us a wonderful lunch on Sunday !!

I had a great group of students, and we covered working with transfers, various ways of making cabachons and things you can convert cabachons into like buttons and pendants.

As all the beads and cabs were still in the kiln on Sunday when we finished I havent seen finished beads first hand (Pictures would be great ladies, hint hint lol) but Georgina did put a few pictures up on Frit Happens. It was a great weekend which I thoroughly enjoyed and Im looking forward to seeing what everyone makes with what they learnt.

Im now busily getting back to "normal", filling some gallery orders, making beads and preparing for my next class in Cheshire next month.

I will be back much sooner this time with pictures of new beads !

Claudia Trimbur Pagel Class beads

My class beads have arrived home !! They arrived in the post this morning, it was very exciting opening the parcel to see if the lived upto my memory of them. The class was great fun and we covered quite a number of things considering it was a one day class. We started off by having a go at applying gold and silver patterns to beads -



I went with basic patterns to keep things simple although I did keep thinking "oooh I could just add a bit more there...." Its quite addictive !!

This bead was originally a mid transparent blue but it has struck to a smokey grey in the kiln -


the nice thing about it being transparent too is the pattern on the other side shows through



Then we moved on to making some murrini which was a little nerve wracking as I had never made murrini quite that large before, and I did manage to bust mine part way through but I learnt so much in doing it and Im looking forward to making some more of my own design.



and we followed that up with making a bead to use the murrini on



All in all it was a great day, very very inspiring and left me with loads of ideas i want to try, now all i need to do is find some time !