Lost and Found

Thanks to Silvermoss http://silvermoss.blogspot.com/ for putting me up for a ‘Lovely Blog award’ I shall put more details when I stop chasing my tail!

In the meantime it seems that I haven’t stopped and haven’t got anything done! Just before heading off to Cornwall (thanks for all the kind messages and wishes) it went well, and due to the poor weather we chose a lovely spot on a secluded beach that I know Chris loved and visited often.

Before heading off I managed to repair my ailing PC! Hurrah! I’d previously tried fitting a PSU a friend had lent me, which also turned out to either be faulty as well or incompatible! Still, it gave us an excuse to catch up and have a couple of beers.

The return from Cornwall was almost a disaster as we left a bag on the bus to the train station containing my other’arfs laptop! Argh! She’s previously been a victim of having a bag snatched from a London train, so neither of us expected to see that again. So imagine our delight and surprise at hearing it had been handed in by some honest Cornish folk – didn’t even leave their details for us to thank or reward them! So I am going to have to reward the young lady who ran around Cornwall picking it up & posting it all back to us (but she doesn’t know if yet ;-) )

I have been working on a very exciting range of new marbles, more of which I shall bore you all at a later date! In the meantime I have also listed a few of the earplugs on Folksy and Coriandr shops to see if they generate any interest, although I doubt I will carry on with these as I want to concentrate more on marbles at the moment.
If you fancy some beads though then check out Veebee beads who is doing some charity auctions for Macmillan Cancer support charity, a lot of people have been donating their spare green glass, while Vicki has been donating her time and skill to making the beads, so please support this worthwhile cause and get some lovely handmade glass beads in return! http://shop.ebay.co.uk/merchant/vicki1725_W0QQ_dmdZ1QQ_in_kwZ1QQ_ipgZ50QQ_sopZ12?_rdc=1

Random Hamster

Between the Walls
Originally uploaded by RandomHamsterling

One nice thing about getting out of my studio and ‘meeting people’ whether they are in the flesh, such as our first East Anglia Etsy meeting this weekend (Hi Lisa www.iseestars.etsy.com and Kathy at www. paintboxcrafts.co.uk/!) or on line.

One of my new online contacts is the wonderfully named ‘Random Hamster!’ aka Tracey at randomhamsterphotography.co.uk/ who has got a wonderfully quirky sense or humour reflected in some of her pictures on sale at Folksy, as well as some dramatic darker photographs. I actually prefer the darker ones of the moment, one she has of a carousel in black and white looks so creepy! As soon as I saw it I had Siouxie & the Banshee’s ‘Carousel’ in my head, and I don’t remember the last time I listened to that! It has that same brooding quality of something sinister about to happen ‘Such little hearts to miss a beat……..’

We seemed so saturated with advertising images making the world appear dayglo it’s great to see someone using their camera to peer though the gaps at a darker world beneath, and reminding us of things long buried to be forgotten. The carousel even reminded me of being stuck on one was I was tiny, and I remember not liking it very much either, amazing! I would never have remembered that until I saw that picture. The picture above is of Battle Abby, and I daren’t think what’s around that corner…

Tracey has kindly given me a very glowing report in her blog, as well as throwing me a new headache/challenge which is providing interesting; to make some of my implosion flowers into an earring/ear-plug. I started in earnest on Sunday morning, re-programming my kiln for the higher Boro annealing, only to find it had developed Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember the next steps in it’s program! An hour later I sort of got it going, hastily changing it once it got up to a heady 530deg C as it thought it should only stay there for 1 minute, not 7 hours! . I then followed with an annealing/strike firings, this is the highest I’ve fired to so far, 570deg C and I will need to fire even higher soon as well! After a few attempts I think I got what I was looking for, although getting a predetermined size was tricky as I normally let the glass decide it’s own shape and thickness. This is certainly an interesting idea Tracey has put to me, for those with ear plugs the range of body jewellery is often limited to wooden dragons and steel shapes. I have seen some very interesting dichroic plugs, but they tend to all be made in America. I shall post picies when the kiln is cool. That’s if the kiln remembers to cool down…….