Lampwork

I bought some little spacer beads from Amy Houston recently, and I really love these beads. They're about 6mm wide, so they're not super tiny. (I'm guessing it's not easy to make lampwork beads much smaller than this, though!)

This is one of the sets I got. I love these colors.

(I also wish I could take pictures as good as hers!)

Anyway, I decided I like these so much that I did my first-ever Alchemy request on Etsy, so I can get more of these and pick my own colors. Even with a bigger quantity, it's hard to narrow it down, but I'm working on it. I want every color, darnit!

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Not to keep harping on things Amazon, but I am really eyeing the new lower-cost Kindle. $139? That's a lot more tempting than the old version was. (It's not currently in stock, but they say it will be in a few weeks. Which is probably faster than you could get an iPad right now!) The $189 version with bigger screen and free 3G also sounds pretty tasty. (That's this: Kindle 3G Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G + Wi-Fi, 6" Display, Graphite, 3G Works Globally - Latest Generation)

More old entries

I posted in the last entry about the first jewelry class I took, in 2007. That was right after my mother died - I think I was trying to distract myself - and after that I got busy being an an executor and fun stuff like that, and didn't make anything else for a long time. It was 2008 before I started again and here's the next thing I made:



I had already bought those beads somewhere along the line - I guess I would call them "art glass" nowadays but I didn't really know at the time what they were, I just thought they were pretty!

You can also see the progress of my jewelry photography techniques, such as they are. This one was taken on the cushion of the (now-lost) swivel chair that I inherited from my mom. It also came out pretty well, considering.

Here's part of the entry that went with the picture:

Rob bought me a really pretty bracelet for Valentine's and all I could think was that I wanted to take it apart and use the clasp. I seem to be hooked. And incidentally, it may seem like I started talking about this out of the blue, a bit, but it's been coming on for a while. I've been playing around and buying bits and pieces of stuff and trying to put together earrings and so forth occasionally for 5 years or more and just never quite got going, too much. And I took the beading class nearly a year ago, and I believe I did mention a while back that I signed up for elisem*'s bead of the month thing (aka botmo*) this year, too, and that's just getting started this month. So I've been sneaking around doing pieces of this in a stealthy way for ages.

Hmm. I'm gonna have to go look around in my jewelry and see if I can find this bracelet Rob gave me, because I don't remember right now what it looked like. Our life has been turned upside down between then and now but surely it's around here someplace. (Up until Ike, we used to live in Galveston, in a first-floor apartment right behind the Seawall. Now we live further inland. This is also the reason I don't have my mother's chair that I mentioned above. It wasn't actually lost per se, it was just covered with mold by the time we attempted to retrieve it. I'm sure I will fill in further backstory as we go but since that's already come up twice, obviously that bit of story needs to be filled in now!)

I should probably also mention that I posted the link to my Livejournal before, but if you wander over there you will not necessarily be able to find all the entries that I'm quoting; that's because I have a paranoid streak and I restrict a lot of my Livejournal posts to friends only. I used to lock anything where I talked about work, for example - that's one reason why I've posted on Livejournal for so many years, because it allows me to post privately about things I wouldn't feel comfortable saying in a public post. But I am trying to get over that!