This lovely necklace was made by Kate from CatsEye using my purple honeycomb lampwork beads. Great design, Kate! And thanks for the photo.
Kate's necklace
Archive for the 'Lampwork' Category
Trying to psyche myself up for the next round of marketing/promotion/PR.
Ugh.
Okay. Don’t dwell on the ugh-ness of it. Just think about ways and means. Besides the newsletter that I still haven’t gotten around to writing, I’ve been looking into ESellerAds.
As far as I can figure out, ESellerAds is a way of offering my Etsy shop wherever I want to on the internet. Well, okay, that was the gist of their marketing story. It could even be true.
Let’s see: at the moment ESellerAds is free in exchange for my email address; it offers to show a rotating exhibition of my Etsy shop either two, three, or four items at a time. I’ve replaced the Etsy Mini, in the blog sidebar, with the three-at-a-time version of ESellerAds. It looks okay, but doesn’t always seem to revolve. Mmm, and it doesn’t seem to be showing any of the newer items that I’ve listed on Etsy since installing it. Which would be a bit useless… Oh, okay, I see. You also get your own ESellerAds web page where you have to tell it to update your ads by pressing the update button. As an added bonus you can check your Ad Performance stats from the same page.
I almost forgot the most useful aspect is that by clicking on an image you can read the Etsy listing, the price is shown and you can “Buy it!” and be taken directly to the Etsy shop. Another interesting feature is that there is a Share button under the ads, so that you (I mean You, dear reader) can share my ads in all the Hip places (y’know, Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc, etc). Isn’t that modern?
I have been making Smiley lapel pins and push pins today. I love the different personalities that emerge from two dots and a line.
Smiley push pins (top left) and lapel pins
I was getting a bit fed up with apologising for my website because it hadn’t been updated in eons. Part of the problem was that my photo organisation was out of control. So I finally sat down and did something about it.
I purchased Adobe Lightroom 2 a few months ago and have been figuring out how to use this rather powerful beast. It’s a neat program, I’m really impressed with it. I use it to catalogue, process and output my photos.
Lightroom is modular and it’s pretty easy to add in third-party engines. There are five modules: Library, Develop, Slide, Print and Web. If you have used Camera Raw and Adobe Bridge, then Lightroom will feel familiar.
I purchased the SlimBox “web engine” from The Turning Gate. After messing around for a while I managed to output different galleries and seamlessly integrate them into my website. So now I finally have galleries of my most recent work: lapel pins and stud earrings, and drawing pins (aka push pins).
I love Lightroom. I’m gonna be writing more about it…
Black and silver lampwork glass stud earrings
Actually although I make it sound like stud earrings are the next logical progression from the lapel pin, I have been working on these stud earrings for a much longer time. It has taken me a long while to come up with some good designs as these are so much smaller than a lapel pin.
In fact I have been reminded of the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for.” I am too impatient to make large beads as it takes longer to melt the glass. Well, these are much smaller quantities of glass, but the designs are also correspondingly smaller and more difficult—it’s a smaller canvas.
Each earring is small and light: about 10-12 mm in diameter and weighs about 2 grams. They are secured with clear rubber disk earring clutches (backs) which keep the earrings secure and flat on your ear lobes.
Here are some pretty cute ladybirds (ladybugs to our American friends).
Ladybirds lampwork glass stud earrings
If you have been following this blog then you may have noticed that I have been obsessing about drawing pins for quite a while. In which case you may be pleased to know that I have been working on the follow-up to the glass drawing pin. Ta dah! Lampwork lapel pins.
Here is an example from the Line Art series, an opal yellow base with raised silver scroll work in Triton. Triton, made by Double Helix, is a very special glass, containing minute amounts of silver. By waving the bead/pin in a reduction flame (low oxygen) the silver particles are brought to the surface of the glass. Triton reduces easily and consistently (unlike a lot of silver glasses) and is so much fun to work with.
Opal yellow and silver lapel pin
The lapel pin measures about 15 mm (5/8 inch) in diameter. It comes with a military clutch so it can used as a lapel pin, or a scarf pin, or a hat pin, or a tie tack. You can pin it on a sweater, or a jumper, or even a shirt (but I would avoid fine wool or silk as the pin shaft is 1.1 mm thick).
I love making these lapel pins, as they are a neat cross between a bead and instant, multi-functional jewellery.
Here’s one from the Net Effect series:
Copper green and black lapel pin
I have several others listed in my Etsy shop and I’m pleased to say that I’ve already sold one on Etsy.
Note to self: The images were produced with the imagemagick montage command.
montage -background "#666666" -geometry "x400+1+1" yip*.jpg montage.jpg
Here are some more drawing pin sets that will be going up on Etsy in the coming days.
I feel like I should point out that the pin heads are 100% glass. I’m often asked what material the decorations are made of. Which always puzzles me for a second. But the decorations (the symbols) are also made from glass. I use what is known as a “stringer”—a thin string of glass—to draw the pattern. It’s a fine juggle between getting the stringer warm enough to manipulate but not too hot so that it melts into an unmanageable mess.
I like to leave the stringers “raised” on a lot of pins. So, the next trick is to carefully melt the stringer enough so that it fuses to the glass pin base, but not too much so that it melts into the base. In this set of blue pins, for example, the spiral and dots have been fully melted in, the rest are raised.
As to the title of this post, I’ve been toying around with this as a push pin “slogan”.
So I have finally got myself organised to list sets of drawing pins in my Etsy shop. Each set consists of 9 handmade glass drawing pins in a gift box. Here is a picture of some of the sets that I have listed—I rather like the Sudoku-ness of the 9 x 9 arrangement.
Nine sets of Designer Drawing Pins
Okay, I have more push pins to show you:
[Ahh. Sorry about that. I am testing out new blogging software. This was a post to test image handling. I thought I was saving a draft, but it looks like I published my test post instead. (My face looks like the middle push pin at the moment.) Ah well. I haven't shown these pins yet, so it can stay.]
I’ve been working on a new project for several months: glass drawing pins (aka push pins, or thumbtacks). It’s taken a while to develop the designs, but now I’m finally ready to show them. Here is a set of blue pins:
I have been learning to adapt my beadmaking techniques to make these little guys. I melt the glass directly on to the drawing pin shaft, so there is no glue involved. They are very sturdy. This photo shows the back of the same pins.
They are available as a set of nine pins, packaged in a little box. They make great gifts! These ones are red, though the photo is a bit dark.
And here’s a set of smileys.
