Are you your Avatar?

A lot of folks on Lampwork Etc. forum are making avatars using a website called blessthischick.com - it's a fun way to waste half an hour and end up with a cute looking graphic!

Here's mine - it's hard to tell because the flag is in the way, but have a mouse/rat suit on!



And here are a whole lot of really talented artists! Most of them have websites, blogs or are Etsy sellers - click on their links, you won't be disappointed ;o)

Here's Jane



I just KNEW she would be a hippy chick!



Valentina's looking very cool and LOOK! She's number one!! :o) Valentina Creations



Isn't Maggie pretty! She looks like a real Lady! Maggie's site is Bead Towne



Maxine wants a real life sparkle wand ;o) - here's her Etsy



Trish, I'd like to know how you found a lampwork tool for your avatar, at least that's what it looks like to me! You can visit Trish's site here

Everyone is joining in! This is fun!

Here's Paula, complete with her beads and knitting ready to be felted - and Paula's Etsy



Samma - I love the hair! I'm thinking of changing mine, maybe I should choose this style ;o) - Samma's Blog



Sueze - I hope that's glass you've been shopping for :o) -Sueze's Etsy



Sweet Mallory! And here's Mallory's Blog



Diane likes pea green but she didn't use any in her avatar ;o)



Gladys, hehe, I didn't know which one was most like you so I chose the wild and crazy one to put here! I'm glad I'm stealing avatars, I get to peek at everyone's site - you have some beautiful jewelry on yours! Gladys' Site



Here is Joy's alter ego! And Joy's Etsy!



Diana is a cowgirl at heart. Here's her website.



Tammie looks like this in the morning ;o) - I wish I did too!



Sabrina's blog is here - check it out - she and her husband sound dangerous!



Sheila's happy she's got a new leopard purse!



Here's Susan, if you are looking for some very pretty fused glass check out her Etsy



Looks like Deborah is another hippy chick!Her Etsy is here



Ananda!  I wonder what the 'R' stands for?


If you make one and send it to me I'll try and add it to this post ;o) And if you've got a website or blog I'll link to it too.

Bargains Galore!

Yesterday I took a drive into the Big City with my friend Jane.  We visited some local attractions - namely Ikea and Lee Valley Tools!

I got bargains!!!  Lee Valley had some things that I think will make wonderful mandrels for only 20 cents each - yes - even the big one!  I can't wait to try them out!



I also found some reaaaallly cheap mandrel holders - great for my 3/32 mandrels, it even says 3/32 right on them.



Nicer still they slot together!



Along with these I found some tiny brushes, that I think will be great for scrubbing the last of the bead release away.  ...note the 'Epilady' logo on the handle!!



Now, they were a little more expensive at 70 cents/10  -- I had to consider that purchase carefully ;o)

Ikea -- I could have spent a fortune, but seeing as Jane managed to do that I thought I should be frugal.  I did find some side plates that we really needed and got six of them.  They are very artsy and cool! LOOK!



And they look even better with food on them! ;o)

If a tree falls. . .

Writing a blog post can feel a bit like that. Does anyone hear it? See it? Much less take time to read it. Flaming Hot's subject of the week is What does your website do for you?

Since my website and blog are one and the same I certainly hope they are promoting my beads and myself. My goal is to have a site where I post my latest beads for sale and have them fly out the door the same day. Impossible? No, there are artists out there doing it, but I know it will take more than putting a page up on the web and waiting for visitor's to come flocking.

I am constantly working towards getting more recognition on the web and in the real world. At the minute I almost feel like my website is one of my offspring! I tend to it regulary, and worry and fuss when somethings not working right. I had a stupid technical problem this week, that has meant disabling some of my plugins one of which is the 'shop', and I just can't find the answer to that which is frustrating me no end.

Here are some of the tools I use to make my website do as much of the work as possible.

I use Wordpress a blogging tool that lets you have multiple pages - a website! Everything in one place with links to my Etsy and iCraft stores.

I blog regularly, (this is why I joined Flaming Hot - sometimes I need help figuring out what to write!), its no use having a website that is static, it won't attract many people and those that do come won't keep coming back if everything stays the same. I'm also realising that blogging can be a very interesting tool for driving traffic to your site! I wrote a post about Nortel's Mega Minor and have had all kinds of visitors because people have been typing 'mega minor' into google and my blog is coming up in the listings. How do I know this?

I use Statcounter it's free, and it tracks who is coming to my blog with wonderful detail - if they've searched it shows me the terms they were searching, I can see where they are from, which pages they visited and for how long, even what browser they're using. It's fun and I have to admit a little bit addictive to see who's stopped by for a visit!

I link my site to others where possible to try and drive more traffic my way. This might be from another site or an online directory. Here's a new one that has just started Glassdir.com they are listing Glass Artists by country. Don't forget to put your site address on anything you can that is not on the internet as well ;o)

And I scour the net looking for sites that offer tips on building business online and off. I just discovered Lori Greenberg's Bead Nerd blog which has an amazing amount of information for anyone wanting to turn their beadmaking into a business. Thank you Lori - I'm learning a LOT! I even just got one of those neat little favicons that show up in your browser bar when someone is looking at your site, I've wanted one of those for a while :o)



I guess at the very least my site is keeping me out of mischief and helping me retain some of my brain cells. It's a challenge to see what I can do next to get more people to visit and keep them coming back and it beats playing online games because hopefully there will be some real rewards at the end of it all!

Beads of Courage

Beads of Courage is a program that helps children with serious illness. It offers a coping mechanism by letting each child commemorate milestones in their treatment with special beads that are strung on a cord. Different colour beads signify different treatments or surgeries. Every time a milestone is passed the child receives a bead to add to their string, allowing them to see how far they have come on their journey of recovery. It seems as if this idea started in Canada, but Beads of Courage (click to visit their site) is based in the US and at present doesn't seem to have any Canadian hospitals on board, which is a bit of a shame.

Beadmakers from all over donate beads to this cause, that are then distributed to participating hospitals. There are special beads of significance, when a child completes his or her treatment they are given a purple heart. Butterflies are also special as they can be given to grieving parents as part of the End of Life program.

If you have spare beads that you feel able to donate I encourage you to visit one of the glass forums and look for current Beads of Courage collections, or visit the Beads of Courage site for more information. You may also download their .pdf that explains the types of beads they are looking for.

Technical Issues

I'm working on some technical problems. My site went down yesterday and it seems to be a wordpress cache problem, my poor brain cells are just not quite sharp enough today to tackle it. I've disabled the cache plugin, and from what I can see everything is working ok, if you find something that isn't can you please let me know.

There's a newer version of wordpress available and perhaps upgrading would fix everything, but perhaps it would just get me deeper into trouble! Sometimes I almost enjoy a challenge like this but sometimes my brain just fogs over and doesn't know what to do about it and today is one of those days. I need a bumper sticker for my screen ....'I'd rather be making beads!'

***I've upgraded the wordpress software, but still have a problem, I'm getting an error message and have had to disable the shop.  For the moment I'm leaving the page there while I try to see if I can find some help.

New beads to share!

Finally I have a few new beads to share.  I'm trying to put some small sets together to sell.

I tried a tutorial for 'Dragon Scale Beads' from Amber/Naos on the lampworking boards.  Her beads are so beautiful.  I was quite pleased with my first attempts and am fighting with myself on whether to etch them or not.  The purple is moretti EDP, and it's such a gorgeous colour!!!  I haven't really used it before, but I'm getting purples, pinks and oranges in these beads - like a lovely sunrise!





Sorry for the bits on the single bead, I guess it's dust from the rice.

Also more in the unboroboro series, though these are not as 'airy' as the earlier ones.  I had some Vetro amber that I used and it produces a more solid colour than the straw yellow.  I still like them.

Cracking Beads Gromit!

If your name is Wallace you might mean this as a compliment, and Gromit might be glowing with pride and joy. Unfortunately this post is not so happy, but hopefully might help explain some of the reasons that glass beads can crack.

Here is the reason I am writing this post -



'Tis a sad sight indeed! This picture explains why glass beads should be annealed!! I did not drop it, and didn't hear it crack when I put it down so can only assume it cracked all by itself.

I'll explain a little -

When I make my beads I save them up and then 'batch anneal' them. This means that they all go into a kiln together for a nice hot soak. Much like a hot bath can relieve the stress of the day for us, a soak in a kiln relieves stresses that have built up in the glass during the beadmaking process. - Well, it's not quite the same process, but it seemed like a good analogy!

This was one of my favourite beads that I was waiting to have annealed - I'd been wearing it because I liked it so much and you can imagine what a shock it was to find it in two pieces. The stresses in the glass were just too much causing it to split in two.

I decided to write a post for new beadmakers and bead purchasers to help explain why annealing is important and also some other things that may cause a bead to crack. The above picture explains the annealing part of the post and the following pictures will explain a few other things that can happen.

When a bead is made the glass is subjected to extreme heat, depending on the design of the bead the heat may not be distributed evenly through the glass. As the bead cools and stress is introduced 'thermal cracking' can occur -



At least this is what I believe has happened here. The bead has cracked in half along the mandrel hole in a nice clean line. If this happens the bead might fall apart before it even comes off the mandrel, or you might notice a crack that causes the bead to fall apart soon afterwards. I have noticed that keeping a bead in the cooler part of the flame longer once it is made reduces how often this happens. 'Garaging' or putting your beads straight into the kiln may also prevent this.

'Incompatibility Cracks' are quite different. I had to experiment here as I'd never actually seen one of these.



You can see that the two beads have broken apart into small and larger pieces that have no uniformity to them. These beads were made by mixing two glasses of differen't COE's together - the glass is incompatible.

I've read that there is a 5% rule when mixing incompatible glasses, that you can put a higher COE in small quantities over a lower COE but not vice versa, and also that even glasses of the same COE can be incompatible. If you want to know more about COE's and compatibility click here. Generally speaking if you use one type of glass in a bead you should not have problems.

On to perhaps the saddest of the cracks - this one I'm calling a 'Stupidity Crack'



It looks much like a thermal crack but has a different cause. This crack was caused by cleaning the bead too roughly with a diamond bead reamer. I've done it more than once, so I am convinced of this. If you are using a diamond reamer to clean your beads - be gentle!! I heard a 'ping' as I rammed the reamer far too roughly (say that six times fast!), and the bead fell apart in my hand.

So, there are my sad pictures for the day.

If you buy beads. . .

If you are someone who buys beads I hope this will explain why some glass beads may seem more expensive than others. Glass bead artists who take pride in their work know the importance of annealing and will usually mention it in their information. They are also aware of the different types of glass and which can be used together. The old saying rings true - you get what you pay for. Many imported beads are made from inferior glass and have not been properly annealed, they are likely to crack and have very short lifespans.

I will not sell beads that haven't been properly annealed. If you see new beads or beads listed as 'coming soon' in my blog and site you can rest assured that before they go up for sale they will be annealed.

If you make beads. . .

I hope the pictures help to show some of the differences and similarities in cracked beads. I am not an expert, and only sharing what I have learned so far. I am happy to receive comments, there is so much to learn!

Is it Spring yet?

Is it Spring yet?

Let me see...

If I stand on tippy toes perhaps I can see it...

Nope it's not here yet...

Picture Perfect... or not!

This weeks subject on the Flaming Hot blog is all about getting the elusive, perfect picture of our beads. This is my first post for Flaming Hot, so be gentle with me - I hope I won't go on too much!

That perfect image.. it's something we all strive for and something many of us pull our hair out over. Let's face it, taking a really nice picture of a glass bead is not something for the faint of heart!

First of all, if I were adventurous I might be out wading through our hip-high snow to find the perfectly lit spot to place my beads! Seems like it would be a good experiment, I'm sure the light would be wonderful! ...I guess I'm not that adventurous!

My 'real' job is Real Estate Photography. I take pictures of people's houses, no I am not a professional photographer, no I don't have a photography studio, no I don't do portrait photography and no, no, NO I do not 'do' weddings!!

I have however picked up a few useful picture processing tips that help me with my bead pictures, if you have Photoshop or a similar picture editing program you might give them a try some time.

Photoshop CS has a feature called 'shadows and highlights', you'll find it under the image, adjustments menu. It's interesting to play about with and see how it affects your photo. If my picture has dark areas where I'd like to see more of what's going on in the bead I might apply 'shadows', it lightens up shadowy areas letting details stand out more. You can preview the effect it has on your image as you use the slider to increase or lessen the percentage. - If you use it too heavily you'll get a nasty pixel thing happening so be careful.

Original photo

I take most of my bead pictures without a flash, and even when I use a flash I tend to take them on the darker side and lighten them up when I process them. A very simple way in Photoshop to lighten your image without loosing detail is to duplicate your background image layer, and then in the new layer set the layer options to 'screen' . Using the % slider allows you to control how much of an effect this filter has on your image. This is my favourite way of lightening my photos.

My pictures aren't perfect, but I think they usually give a fair representation of my beads, and perhaps that is the best we can hope for since in the real world everyone's monitors are slightly different.

Lightened with 'screen'

Shadows and Highlights and sharpen filters.

When I first started looking for tips on getting good bead pictures, I was having trouble positioning single beads to show their best features. Someone said salt! It works for me, a saucer of salt (or rice) allows the beads to sit the way you want. ... a word of advice - make sure they are DRY before you place them!! They don't look so good with grains stuck on them and blobs of congealed salt where water has run out of the bead holes, believe me - I speak from experience ;o)

Side by side comparison

Winter's Grip

Winter is not quite ready to let go!!

Strangeness part 2.

One of only a couple of shows we watch weekly is LOST. I'm hopeless at staying awake from 9-10pm when it first airs, so I've been watching it a week behind when it is on at 8pm. My husband David watches it the first week at 9pm.

I was looking forward to this weeks episode of LOST. David told me I'd like the episode because it was more of the character Desmond's story AND because there was a RAT in it, and her name was ELOISE! We said how odd that was being the rat brain in the other movie was called Louise and wondered if they had taken it from that movie. Now that was a bit strange! Two rats in two programs that were about reality shifts and both having close to my name, but it gets stranger....

When I finished work that day I found David watching a movie on tv.... yup you guessed - Possible Worlds(the movie with the rat brain)! I started rewatching it with him. He was getting supper ready and was out of the room for an interesting scene, where one of the main characters looks at a 3 dimensional artwork on a wall. I had missed this the first time I saw the movie and it was very cool. The artwork looked abstract until you shifted the angle that you looked at it, and then it did one of those wierd things where the points closest to you, switched place with the points further away (in your perception) and a real image came into your mind of a house. I'd love to see it again because it was one of those things that makes your brain shift in an odd way. Anyway, I told David what he missed and was trying to explain the artwork, and told him it reminded me of something Escher would do, and he understood.

At the next commercial break I realise I'm looking at an Escher print and they are advertising a show about him that coming on, the first I'd heard of it, as I would have watched it - we commented on how strange that was and missed what times the show was airing.

I went to the search feature to find out when the show was going to be on. It only came up once in the listing -- that night at 8pm, the same time I would be watching my LOST episode!!!!

I'm now waiting for part three of the strangeness to happen. In the movie there was a car with a license place 11A64 - any bets on that being part of the serial number or something on my new equipment when it arrives??

The image of that artwork stuck in my mind, and I can't help thinking that just maybe that illusion holds a partial answer to our view of the universe. We are looking at everything from a particular perspective that we are used to, but just wait until that perspective shifts!! We could be in for a very interesting ride!

Ottawa Glass Bead Artists

I've set up a website/blog for our Ottawa group of lampworkers, my hope is that it will give us a place on the web where we can promote our group and ourselves.  It might even be helpful in the future if we do some joint ventures - a great way to advertise us all under one name and website.



For now the address is www.ogba.wordpress.com , I'm sure it'll take a bit of time for members to start filling the site out with information and pictures, but hopefully at the next gathering Valentina and I can explain how to make it work for members who aren't sure.  I've added a forum as well, just for the fun of it - yes, when I get bored and I can't make beads I make things on the internet instead.  It's a weakness, I can't help it!

Anyway, I want the whole thing to be flexible so that everyone's happy with what is up there and they feel like we are representing ourselves in the best way we can.

It is my goal to supplement and hopefully replace some of our income with money earned from my bead sales.  I know it's not going to happen overnight, but they do say persistence and hard work pays off.

Strangeness part 1.

I'm waiting for my new equipment to arrive, and outside the biggest storm of the winter is dumping up to 50cm's of snow on us, so I'm heading off on a different subject from beads today.

I'm sure most of us have had strange synchronicities in our lives and stopped and wondered for a moment if it means something.

Recently, I've had a few. In order for you to understand why they are especially strange to me, you need to know that for about the last eight years we have had pet rats. Our last boy Stuart died recently and we decided to take a break and not get any more. This has been hard, their cages have been moved out into the shed and the house seems like something is missing.

Ok, onto the strangeness. A few weeks back I had been looking online for YouTube videos about one of my favourite books - The Holographic Universe. It offers an interesting explanation as to how our universe works, an explanation that seems to be coming more an more inline with things science is finding out on the sub-quantum level. What the Bleep is movie that also tries to explain this phenomenon. I won't delve into that, but I did find a video that really made me stop and think about things again . Part of the video is explaining how our senses work and how, in theory, if you could isolate a brain in a tank and hook it up to a computer; you could send it electrical impulses like the ones it would normally receive from our eyes, ears, etc. The brain would be unable to tell that it wasn't in a body, experiencing all these things. Part two of the video covers this.

So without going too deeply into things, that is the start of the strangeness. A day or two later I happened upon a movie on tv. I started watching it as it seemed promising. The movie was called Possible Worlds, and starts out as a murder mystery, but quickly turns into something much more interesting! In one scene, at a laboratory one of the detectives sees a tube full of liquid with wires hooked up to something inside. The tube is part of a machine that has a flashing red light. The detective asks the scientist what this thing is. He is told that it is the brain of a rat, and that the light flashes because the brain believes it is receiving food as a reward for having completed some task. The rat it turns out is a female, and stranger still her name is Louise!

It gets stranger, but I'll save that for the next post!

** A little bead content - Corina has recently started making beads called Quarks, some of them have checkerboard murrini in them - seems also that checkerboards also have a deeper meaning than the simple game we learned as children.