Saturday’s Lesson

I had so much fun teaching the lovely Emma from The Candy Tree on Saturday.
She had never worked with hot glass before and did a wonderful job! Here are some pictures of the beads she made (and a couple of buttons on top of that for fun). All of these were mastered in just four hours at the torch, she’s definitely a natural!

If you are around Edinburgh and interested in learning some lampwork, I offer 4 hour or 8 hour lessons. Feel free to e-mail me for more information.

Helen*

2013…

Little Breakfast in Delft Set

I feel blog guilt. It’s been quite a while, but everything has been mad busy here, which is definitely a good thing! I taught a lovely lady some lampwork skills yesterday, have a couple of new galleries lined up for 2013 already, and my etsy shop is ticking along well. On top of all this, I’m working slowly but surely on some new ranges of jewellery and beads, and hope to share the inspiration and making process with you all.

Little Version of Original Junkyard Set

In the meantime, I have been working on some little, more affordable for January versions of some of my more popular beads, ranging from £12 to £14 for a set. I’ll leave you with some of them for now (links are clickable) and be back with some of my new work and ideas quicksmart!

Little Version of Scrapyard Set

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and wish you all the best for 2013

Helen*

Little Version of Original Shipyard Set

Little Doors

Beware, this is a very image-heavy post…

There’s a little fun project I have been working on for a few weeks now, a study of lovely colourful painted, rusting, graffitied and peeling doors around the world. It even inspired me to paint the studio door this week, which is looking good! Anyway, I found and old drawing of an orange door I did in Barcelona, and I had a wee search on Pinterest to find some more. I found some gorgeous images including these…

Source: flickr.com via Helen on Pinterest

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Source: going-barefoot.tumblr.com via Helen on Pinterest

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Source: fuckyeahcooldoors.tumblr.com via Helen on Pinterest

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They’re really pretty aren’t they? So they led to a sketch or two…

And after a bit of playing around, ten totally unique pairs of earrings were created! They are all made with hot glass on surgical steel backs, so they are totally hypoallergenic. The steel is attached in the flame so it is completely fused to the glass, and no glue has been used (I don’t trust glue). Its image heavy, and all of the pictures link to their listing in my online shop. At £15 each, they are a snip for a totally original piece of jewellery. I hope you like them!

I hope you like them, and have a lovely weekend!

Helen*

Parasols and Lanterns

An old uni sketch that came in handy this week.

There is a post I wrote about these sketches over two years ago somewhere in this blog. They were inspired by Japanese culture and imagery, particularly haikus and haigas. They aren’t the best quality, sorry.

Another Japanese sketch, Lanterns.

Haiga and Umbrellas.

Anyway, they came very much in handy this week! I got a lovely new graphite shaper to play with, if anything to get me out of my disc rut. Its shape reminded me of parasols, so out came the old sketchbooks, and here’s what I came up with in glass. It’s nice to be able to have sufficient control over stringer (thin pieces of glass to ‘draw’ on beads with in the flame) to be able to represent my illustrations. My stringer work is still at a pretty simple level at the moment, but something I will be working hard on to refine.

Colourful Parasols

Purple Palette Lanterns

Autumn Palette Parasols

The bead sets are all for sale in my online shop, just click the picture to see the listing.

Helen*

Well, Hello/ Made in Scotland

New(ish) Beadlets

What a little neglected blog I have! The festival has been and gone, and I have to admit heaving a sigh of relief!
The stall was crazy, really wonderful, and lovely to meet so many customers from all over the world, but my goodness, it was exhausting, and after 10 hours a day chit-chatting and selling away all I wanted to do was crash. But I’m back, and working on new projects, which is always when I feel most inspired to blog.

The next up and coming exhibition is one I am really excited about! It goes back to the very very beginning of my jewellery designing journey in fact. A long time ago (well, four and a bit years ago) I was lucky enough to land a job in the Little Bead Shop in Bruntsfield with the lovely Gil and Emma Baird, and learned so much of what I know now from working there! Emma was the one who introduced me to lampwork, and look where that took me! Anyway, I digress. The Little Bead Shop has been moving with the times and has now gone beyond beads and grown into ACS Jewellery Studio with five fully equipped jewellery benches through the back, and a beautiful gallery space at the front. I’m going to be in the next exhibition they are holding, ‘Made in Scotland’, which features some very talented jewellery designers including some new Duncan of Jordanstone graduates, a handful of ACJ’ers, and the lovely Emma! I’m so excited to be back there!

Made in Scotland

I’ll have to do a wee inspiration/sneak preview post of my work, but in the meantime, hold the date September 14th. Its going to be a fabulous opening night, and it would be wonderful to see you there!