Accidental Glass

Sometime it’s the accidents that help me do things better, these are the ‘happy’ accidents, although they don’t always seem happy at the time!
I have spend days working on a new type of necklace with leaves made of glass, and I’m not talking about those little mould stamped green leaves you see in the bead shops, these are monsters! Most are about 2-3inches long, twisted, with colours layered into them using borosilicate glass. After I made the first batch I found the choker I put them on was too thick for the holes I made. Drat! So next glass session I make some more, and since they are organically made but going with the flow of the glass, not all of them were useable on the necklace I had in mind (although I am sure I will find a use for them eventually, even if it’s selling them in a de-stash sometime!). I threaded some on, and realised it needed so spacer beads, but once again the wire was too thick for my stash. This is where being a lampworker comes in handy, I was back to the torch for third time to make some customer green spacer beads!

So after a lot of to and fro-ing, I finally got the necklace done. Something bothered me about it, maybe it was because it didn’t just ‘happen’ as my best stuff does when some magic brings it all together. Regardless I went to take some snaps of it, and was trying to set up some pictures when the whole thing slid off onto the floor, meeting up with various objects that were rather ‘too solid’ for such a delicate crop of leaves. I think you can guess the result!

I don’t know if I’ve become more ‘Zen’ since I’ve started lampworking, or just because I was so tired, but I wasn’t as upset as I probably should have been about this, but when I looked at the ‘remain’ an hour later, it suddenly clicked. Only three of the leaves had survived, and it looked so much better like this! Less is more, I reminded myself! I made some slight adjustments, and it looks good, although I think I can still make some much better leaves for the next and final version.

I’ve been quite busy lately, and I’ve recently opened another shop outlet on MISI, where I’ve been transferring some of my stock from the old Etsy Shop. I am still in two minds about Etsy, but until things pick up or I have time to make 200 things to list there to make it worthwhile I will be putting stuff onto Folksy and MISI for the time being. They are all priced in £££’s rather than suffering exchange rate yo-yoing, and are just really nice places to be at the moment with a lot of friendly folk there. www.folksy.com/shops/SteamPunkGlass or my new MISI shop atwww.misi.co.uk/steampunkglass Hope to see you there!