Big holes

Last year I sold some of my beads in a lovely art gallery up north called the Tutukaka gallery.
A great spot near Whangarei right on a harbour. They closed down for a few months through the winter but are about to reopen for the upcoming summer/ tourist season and so I have an initial order to fill of sixty big hole beads to fit those chunky bracelets.
Perversely as soon as I have a commitment to make a certain item to order I suddenly feel like making lots of other random stuff instead!
So I made myself spend a session making some brighter colours than I usually choose to keep it interesting. The pale greeny one is yellow I guess didn't strike properly, but still kinda pretty, the rest I'm happy with. I tried three different reds, the middle one came out the best but the trouble is I didn't keep track of which one was which!

I need to clean the bead release out a bit better as well but yeah, it's fun to play with different colours:)

At last!!

No beads today, I'm just back from visiting my 95 yr old Grandma in the South Island,
 took some pics of her ramshackle barn

Anyway...
GREAT news, I've been waiting more than two years for this announcement... Wilco are finally coming back to NZ next April! Woot woot!! I got to see them in 08, 09 and 10 and they were amazing every time, last time I was in the front row and Jeff Tweedy spoke to me after playing my request, She's a jar (life highlight lol) and I snapped up one of Glens drumsticks thrown into the crowd at the end, thanks to help from Joe, best friend ever!!

This time I've promised myself I'm going to both shows, Auckland and Wellington, and since I didn't get to see them last year or this year I can justify that.
Glad I already bought Regina Spektor tickets for December too so I don't have to choose ha, and an enamelling weekend workshop in November:)

There is a light...

Comparing the difference between my indoor setup with 3x white light and the sun behind clouds.

and some closer indoor shots of the three earring pairs in the middle

Oh yeah, new banner up top too, so much harder to make than actual beads lol. Thank god for my teenage sons expertise!

Disc-lexic no more

Discs have been one of the hardest shapes for me to make, somehow they would always end up eliptical rather than circular,  so I gave up on them for a while. 

Amazingly when i just tried again I can actually do them now! I just have to wind the glass a lot slower and cooler than I usually do.

These are a little different, these discs take a longer to make and involve a lot of raking dots in to the middle and are harder to keep centered.  I plan on making them into rings with silver tubing through the bead like the bottom lily ring I made a while back.

Kamera

Oh, I love my new Canon SX260! I did a lot of research before choosing it, tossing up between the canon and a Nikon and taking advice from other bead makers. I tried them both in store but the deciding factor was that the Canon has manual settings, I don't know how to use them yet but I am getting some good results with auto.
The pics I've been taking outside show good detail in natural light but i also wanted some indoor 'studio' quality pictures. I finally got this lightbox set up together with help from this tutorial, which included the gradient background http://laurabrackenblog.blogspot.co.nz/2012/03/diy-photo-cube-tutorial-instructions.html

And these are the results which I'm pretty happy with :)

 

The studio revamp

'Studio' still refers to 'corner of garage' but now a cleaner, tidier, reorganised and super functional corner of garage plus featuring a much longed for set of vintage library catalogue drawers!! Oooohhh!

I've even categorized stuff/components into around half the drawers so far!

Now my glass rods all sit at arms length in front of my torch, way easier for picking out an extra colour to use mid-bead, or when I decide the colour I'm using is getting tooo short and my fingers are getting toooo hot, haha.
My photo lightbox area is still a work in progress, I'm liking the pictures I can take outside with my new camera, (Canon sx260 - love) but still figuring out the lighting set up, gradient background and manual settings etc to get pro looking indoor shots.
Still on a roll making larger focal beads though, only threw one in the water bucket from last night:)

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:)