Starting Again

Ok, revisiting this abandoned railroad track to resuscitate and rejuvenate!
It has been nearly a year, a year in which I lost my mum, lost my muse for a while, retreated.
I've still been making glass, posting occasional pictures to flickr, obsessively scrolling through pinterest which I love but while it provides a tremendous amount of inspiration and wonderful ideas somehow the addictive quality makes me keep searching for more ideas rather than following through on many of the ideas it gives me!
I put my laptop on the floor and accidentally stood on it months ago, so have been tolerating a largish blob and crack across the screen which slowly spread to engulf more the left hand top corner, I used the back button by guessing approximately where it sat behind a black splotch!
Finally enough, actually I first bought a new camera to take better bead pictures, actually even before that I made new beads which I really liked and felt were worthy of taking decent pictures, and then a new laptop became an obvious necessity.
One of those things where I put up with something broken for a long time and then, now, wonder what took me so long!
So now I plan for this to be a more visual and regular occurrence starting with the recent beads I am proud of:)

  

Repurposing

I've been using random bits of copper tubing and wire I've found lying around the house for a while to make headpins and more recently flattening out tubing to make ring parts, such as this new-not quite finished ring...

 with copper bezel and base on a silver ring. I really like the contrast between copper and silver but here where I've soldered copper together the solder still looks silver, (I expected to be able to get copper coloured solder but now know there's no such thing!) so I need to blacken the whole thing in good ol Liver of Sulfur. I also have plans to experiment with some solutions to try and acheive the pretty blue/green copper patina.
And I have also been given this wonderful item...

an old copper toilet cistern!!
It's almost too cool to cut up, but I won't have to for a while yet, and even those internal bits will provide lots of material for toilet-rings:)

NZ bead exchange

I've sent off these 10 beads to the annual exchange and now wait to see what treasures I will recieve in return:)

Riveting, at last.

Sheesh, what I thought would be the 'easy' part of finishing the riveted silver/glass rings I had in mind, turned into a frustratring mess.
As always seems the case with my learning process I have to muck things up a couple of times then undo and redo them before I 'get' it lol.
So third time lucky? Nope.
Simply hammering the silver tubing down into a rivet using a dapping block and punches which I figured would take a matter of minutes took over the majority of my silver class work time.
The fist ring I completed without breaking the glass I broke the silver instead! Grrr. the tubing started to split on one side and once that happened it was impossible to hammer more without worsening the split, resulting in a 'pacman' shaped rivet, shown on the right (yeah I totally meant for it to look like that:/ )
What I learnt from that though was that my tubing was tooo long  and it only takes an extra 4mm above the bead to make a rivet without  a pacman split, maybe even less would be better. 

I'm happy with the last finished rivet attempt on the left. The rivet is still not quite tight enough against the bead, as shown below, but theres no movemnt in it and I think it's a pretty ring.  

The remainder of the silver classes I spent discovering the allure of Liver of Sulfur (not the smell!) and happily throwing all my completed silver pieces into the jar to turn black and then scrubbing off some of the black to leave a beautiful aged finish. I LOVE this effect.

Pretty slumps:)

Riveting post to come, for now just slumping improvement:)

Silver Class

I'm really enjoying going to someone elses studio for three hours one evening each week:) I really get to concentrate and be more productive than I do at home, having an expert brain to fire questions at is awesome too. I still typically have 3 different projects in process at once (not to mention the unfinished things at home!) but the one closest to completion is my bead tube ring.
A hammered silver band with a flap riveted tube

I suffered a small setback when this happened to the bead I was making the ring for...

 And then this...

Boo-hoo. As much as my beads are kiln annealed "for strength and durability" and generally tolerate being dropped on a concrete floor, they don't really like being hammered!

So then I had to make a new bead for the ring, which turned out brilliantly

So, next class to flare out the tube - without breaking the bead!

Today is the anniversary of Jeff Buckley passing away. I will be listening to his album Grace and remembering an amazing musician with a beautiful pure soul!

Eureka... Cab success!!

I sooo love when I come up with a solution to a problem and then my idea actually works out:)
After my cab disasters I looked online a bit for some answers without out luck, but then just letting it all percolate in my brain I eventually had an EPIPHANY in the middle of the night! I don't know if my idea is original? or if it's the way anyone else does it? or if it's actually just really simple and obvious? but it came to me seemingly out of the blue and I couldn't wait to get out to the workshop and give it a try.

I figured that maybe I could stop the centre of the beads collapsing and the holes moving up... by filling the holes with a glass stringer and allowing it to melt in. I was excited and it seemed like it would work but I wasn't sure until I gave it a try, (I thought my last experiment would work too!).

I went a lot gentler with the kiln heat too, and selected just flat beads without reducing colours.
ta da -

 They came out nicely smooth and rounded with flat bottoms and nicely tapered edges, YAY!
I still need to tweak the idea a bit, better fitting stringers and matching colours and maybe even melt a little further. I was being cautious this round so the holes are still a little open. Also the beads obviously get larger when they spread out so I need to use some smaller to begin with but I think I'm finally on the right track.

 I'm a happy girl:) So now heres's a whippet pic...