Alien Sea Huntress

Or it might end up just being called Sea Huntress, or The Huntress. In my mind it's just 'why have I got this crazy necklace idea in my head? I've got enough half finished projects already without starting another one!'

This nearly did stall, and I know that I could still be tweaking it, but I'm trying to get back to one of the earliest lessons' I learnt with glass - stop, move on; that's as good as you can do for now, learn by it and take those lessons to the next thing you make. Easier said than done, I even posted some earlier pictures on Frit Happens to get some feedback to see what needed tweaking. I almost ended up with too many ideas of changes, so after a dozen more times threading and unthreading it, moving elements around, adding and taking them away, it ended up going very nearly back to how it started. I did find adding a few small Tibetan spacer beads helped some of the claws sit more neatly, which ended up being the main tweak. I wasn't going to put the spike in the centre, and just have the two claws facing each other, but when I did it was just crying out for something major between them. I even had to make beads for it - yes beads! I hardly ever make beads, and I hated the first ones, but then remembered some 'bumpy' style ones I'd seen somewhere, so made some like that which I really liked, and as a bonus kept more of the metallic lusters.

It's been an interesting project, and bizarrely came from working on the Alien monsters, where I'd developed some interesting ways of adding colour and texture. With this one the colour has a really, really, high silver and metal content, so in real life has some wonderful metallic lusters. Oddly though parts of it show up as yellow when light shines through them, but green-blue when the light hits it straight on!

I am still deciding if I should list this on Etsy, or take it along to the May Expo. When I make things like this, I tend to think 'would this look like something someone of 'Farscape' would have worn?' If the answer is yes, or at least possiably, then I think it's right.

Talking of which, I have some news about the Aliens, but it's not confirmed yet, so you are going to have to wait until the next post, but I will post on my Facebook page as soon as I know it's going to happen.

In the meantime, here's lots of pictures of the necklace.

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!