New international shipping rates, another custom order and another Etsy treasury.

Last weekend the US Postal Service increased the shipping rates for international packages significantly. While the price for first class packages went up, in comparison the priority mail flat rates went up more. What I used to ship priority flat rate will now be shipped first class parcel if possible - I haven't changed all the shipping rates in my Etsy shop yet, for some things I have just taken international shipping back out as it's ridiculous to pay $23.95 for a priority mail flat rate envelope to Europe if the items costs (e.g.) $3.50. I'm working on it as time allows and so far this week there hasn't been much of that. Of course I didn't want to increase shipping ahead of time.

I mentioned the Hilo High School Craft Faire in an earlier post. One of my coworkers came by with his wife and a friend, and the wife really liked some of my lampwork beads.

He came to me the week after and asked would I make a necklace for her in time for Christmas. I had to redesign once because the seed beads went into the holes of the lampwork beads, but this is how it came out (click on the picture for a bigger one):

The lampwork is goldstone chips (worked too hot) on Moretti ivory and Moretti light teal - and I changed the clasp to a sterling silver one after taking the picture. It's strung on softflex as almost always, with 4mm crystal Swarovski bicones, 6/0 seed beads and twisted square liquid silver.

And my lilikoi seeds made it into another Etsy Treasury:

'Passion' by ursulasalcove

Inspired by the passion flower and my own passion for fiber arts, I hope this treasury inspires you to pursue your passion.

Lilikoi seeds - pur... hilobeads $7.00	Deep Purple Handwov... FortuneWeaves $50.00
Silk Ribbon Purple ... lornabateman22 $56.95	Vintage Charm Brace... MoonHollow $19.95
Cagoule feutre/soie... zregine $77.00	Winter Sale Purple ... folkowl $38.00
Passion Flower Neck... jewelrita $35.00	Needle Felting Wool... egprimitives $5.00
Purple Swarovski Cr... ProtectiveSpir... $60.00	Purple Passion Hand... VioletRose258 $27.00
Purple Passion Pin GypsyPurl $58.00	Sangria Throw/Wrap ... VanessaTCunnin... $750.00
Royal Purple and Go... sunrisehandwov... $80.00	Purple Passion Flow... Gypsyharte $38.00
8/0 Czech Glass See... PiecesParts $3.99

Treasury tool supported by the dog house

(and extra spaces again taken out by me. It's really easy - on a Linux/Unix system. You copy and paste into vi/vim, close the file, open in pico (or nano which is basically the same thing), justify with a ^J and copy back out of the result.)

Melting goldstone

So, OK, I think I fried it (the goldstone). But, I have to say I still like the shininess of the resulting beads:

I finally also got around to something I meant to do for ages, attach my watch to a swivel clasp. This way I can attach it to any necklace or bracelet I wear and never have to think about the rash I get from wearing a wrist watch again.

My first big hole bead

Well, my first big hole bead that didn't have a cracked end. It's long gone because I made it explicitly as a birthday present for a friend, almost 3 months ago.

My dots quite obviously need more practice. The big hole bead has dark ivory 'dots' on dark aqua, the spacers on the side are ink blue (and they are more even in size than it looks in the picture). All the glass used is Moretti/Effetre, and all my beads are annealed in my digitally controlled Glasshive kiln.

As I made this as a birthday present for a friend who doesn't make jewelry I just strung it on a ready made chain necklace.

Etsy Treasury: lampwork spacers and a necklace of mine are in Lucky Irish Green

'Lucky Irish Green ' by mmg10

Prayers On A Wire Team Members will not get pinched for not wearing green as they showcase their beautiful rosaries, jewelry, and beads for Saint Patricks Day

Emerald green Irish... secondarycreat... $36.00	All green Irish the... secondarycreat... $30.00	Earthy Spacers ... ... GlassBeadArt $7.90
SALE, Handmade La... adornedintreas... $11.99	Mixed Greens - lamp... hilobeads $50.00	Emerald green trans... hilobeads $7.00
CROWNING GLORY silv... ssimon933 $12.00	PERIDOT ROSARY WRIS... ssimon933 $18.00	Spring Green Mini L... rosebud101 $15.00
Coin Pearl Rosary ManifestRosari... $138.00	FREE SHIPPING Saint... righteousrosar... $30.00	Green and White Sto... katiesjewels $10.00
Rosary Beads Jungle... PrayersinPurpl... $18.00	I know i am COOL :... up2skies $16.00	Teardrop Earrings, ... Gilliauna $16.00

Treasury tool is sponsored by Lazzia.com A/B image testing.

No place like home ...

After being gone for a week I'm home again. Not that I didn't have fun, but the traveling gets to me. I got up 22 hours ago. Norman was waiting for me at the airport when I got there, the duffelbag arrived too and we were out of there in shorter time as they start charging for.
Norman said the cats, especially Zoomie, had been upset, but they all came and the two older ones stayed to get fed. And there are some ripe cherry tomatoes, and the rest I'll have to check in the morning.

Oh, and, what I got home from was the EPICS meeting at Brookhaven National Lab (which is on Long Island). Got some overview over some (software) packages that I had been wondering about but I'm not convinced they are for us (at the JAC, definitely not HiloBeads), learned about some new projects, got lost getting there from Newark (but not too lost, the Sun was out), took a good walk on Smith Point Beach, and met the Lab's glass blower, Barry Lafler. If I get around to it there's going to be a few more posts, but at least there are going to be some pictures of Barry and the glass lab, and hopefully at some point a picture of what I picked up at Smith Point (beach glass and shell pieces).

And, I want to thank Leslie Baer for all the driving instructions with maps, without which I definitely would have gotten a lot more lost than I did.

Everybody needs a calendar ...

The 2011 AGLF lampwork calendar is available for preorder here:
http://www.piercesdesigns.com/pages/AGLF.htm.

A new lawsuit was filed against 30 lampworkers. To help out with the cost the AGLF have put together a calendar again. There's a partial preview on the website as well that's why I'm not including one here :)

It's lilikoi season ...

Once again, it's lilikoi season. I finally found the end of my main lilikoi picking site on one side. 300 feet from the road, with a hill involved. And of course, as it's wild lilikoi, it's overgrown. This year the season didn't start slowly but pretty much with a bang. The second week into it my legs don't hurt anymore - this is the first time I got sore legs picking lilikoi. If it starts out with 2-3 bags a week for a month it's easy to get used to. If you get 6 bags in the second week it's different, especially as I also got 17 years older since I started picking. It isn't a real big lot yet, not like in this post (that was 13 bags in 3 days), but I also finally got my pruners back into the truck to cut through some of the weed vines (pilau maile), and relearned why it is a good idea to take more than one bag even if you don't have a bag carrier. You really don't want to carry lilikoi down the hill and then carry them back up. Really. You also don't want to lug a heavy bag through underbrush if you can help it.

Of course, yesterday it would have seriously backfired if I had done that on my last trip down the hill. I was way back in the brush when it sounded like rain coming, slowly getting louder, and it was rain coming. I got myself and the lilikoi back up the hill and into the truck and by the time I was inside the truck it was a downpour. If I had had more than one bag I would still have been down there when it was pouring. I got most of the lilikoi out for the time being - but that's as of yesterday, and tomorrow I'm of course going back to work. It's a good thing that the first big drop (and the bigger one of the two, if there is a second one) happens while the days are still relatively long here. I still have an hour or two of daylight after work now, and hour if I get out late. And if I'm lucky, on a grocery shopping day I get home before 8 and it isn't raining when I get there.

Today I did some catching up on yard work, little as it was, counted enough Swarovski crystals to restock my trays, finally finished putting the next batch of mgambo seeds into clothes pins for drilling (I drill them by 100s), finished washing one batch of gardenia taitensis seeds (tiare, or Tahitian Gardenia) and got some new ones (the latter one is a good thing as most of the current batch is sold - wholesale).

Is there time for lampworking? No, not really. I'm glad I'm caught up on batch annealing so that if I have some time and energy left over I can make some beads, stick them into the fiber blanket and anneal them later. I hate small batch batch annealing with my current setup because the mandrel that I use as a mandrel rest is sloped in the kiln when I batch anneal (I've been lucky with that this far though and not gotten beads stuck together or even gotten marks). Of course, the weather that causes the lilikoi to get ripe and drop also implies more wind than I can deal with for lampworking. So, while I miss lighting the torch, the weather wasn't really good for it anyway.

But also, if anybody in or around Hilo reads this far: if you know of any place where I can pick lilikoi, and you are the owner or know the owner of the land and allow me to pick the lilikoi there (it keeps both the pigs and the rats down or out), please let me know. The closer to Hilo town you are the more likely I'm going to pick you up on it. I used to pick lilikoi from Kalapana to Ookala, but these days I rarely leave town to pick. Gas got too expensive, and as I'm by myself these days I can't pick as much as even with a 5 year old as a helper (the former 5 year old is about to turn 22 and lives in Oregon, and the last time she was home in the summer she helped pick lilikoi :) ).

And now I'm going to count some more Swarovski crystals.

Brief update

After taking most of Monday to catch up with Sunday night's computer failure at work it took me most of today to catch up with what I didn't do Monday (at work, wfacq3 - again). Lucky me, my husband cooked dinner last night. Tonight I drilled 100 mgambo seeds and caught up with the bead cleaning (including catching up with the batch annealed ones - I did the last batch of batch annealing for now on Sunday), including the broken, chipped and otherwise ones. I can now turn those into frit (whenever time allows). Petrol green, partially reduced, ought to look pretty good on dark ivory, with the red and some orange.

Now to get over this head cold ...

Maren's day off

I took today off from work because there was something I had to do, Norman needed me home (and that's as far as I'll get into this, nothing scary, everything is well). I got some of my bookkeeping done, that was part of the plan for while I was spending time not at home waiting. Found that I should probably use a calculator as in the end my wholesale and retail totals didn't add up to my total total. Maybe it's time to go back to computer aided bookkeeping. (Rethink that: Lug notebook computer around instead of ledger? Bank on power available when battery runs out? Better keep that calculator handy. Weighs a lot less.)

So, getting back home after having a late breakfast out, got some stuff done and then decided I needed some more sleep. The weather wasn't for yard work or making beads anyway. Missed a sortof repeat meeting of my Etsy street team during the time, feel bad about that in hindsight. After a while the weather got better for yard work but worse for making beads. So, did some more yard work. Pulled another 500 or so Alexandra Palm tree seedlings, got another few (definitely single digit, and small) strawberry guava stumps out, but found a buried tool, no handle left, pick axe. Rough as it is (Norman says it predates him, and he lives here since 1984), it came in rather handy and helped me to get a bunch more stuff out without mangling my fingernails completely again.

Now, what happened to the bead making? The wind finally died down way after I got back from grocery shopping. I did more yard work after grocery shopping first before the wind died down. As tomorrow is another workday, no go on the bead making.

At least I got most of the house vacuumed, the laundry put away, the UKIRT fault summary in on time (yes, I try to do this on vacation too, but don't always manage, today I did), and I still didn't take pictures of the beads I made a week and a half ago, still didn't list the 6/0 Ornela seed beads on Etsy, still didn't make any new jewelry to send over to Kona. I'm glad I took the whole day off in spite of that Norman didn't really need me to stay home the whole day. I did get caught up on some things. However, it doesn't feel like I got caught up on sleep, so some of that is next (7 hours at max, and I call that catching up).

As I made some headway on my weekend stuff (grocery shopping included), there's some hope for making beads during the weekend.

I should have taken a "before" picture of the driveway because an "after" picture alone is going to be useless. I did some more work on that today too, after doing a lot of driveway weeding last weekend.

Updates: Etsy street team, new lampwork on Etsy, and I'm getting a second (spare) torch

Much to my surprise I got invited to join a new Etsy Street Team, Prayers on a Wire. We're about rosaries and rosary supplies. While I have never made a rosary yet this is partly due to supplies other than beads being hard to find here, though I have been asked (in spite of the Lutheran church that I grew up in not using rosaries, I would make them), and I have sold Job's Tears to rosary makers before. I hope to make lampwork sets for decadal beads and the like as well.


Our Street Team has a summer competition going that is entitled "Colors of the Ocean", and while it is not required to list the entry on Etsy, I did:
This is Hilo Bay Beach, light teal, the link will take you to my Etsy listing. This set of lampwork beads was made by me, here at home, one by one, melting glass with my HotHead torch. The smaller beads are Moretti (Italian glass) light teal, the larger ones are the same light teal, rolled in sand from the Hilo Bay Beach and then encased in clear Moretti glass, annealed in my digitally controlled Glasshive kiln and the bead release cleaned out with my Dremel drill. You can see through these beads, including the empty space, not like a lot of the beads imported from Asia.

As I got sortof addicted to lampworking as time and weather allows (I can't make beads in the carport when it's windy, and work comes before lampwork) the last thing I need is my torch to give out (I already have 2 kilns), so when a good deal came up I ordered myself a second one (another HotHead, hopefully old style).

Once I get my second torch, and a get second gas hose, and as long as both are working, if anybody wants to come by and use a hothead when I'm home, and possibly already even making beads, I'm game. It'll be kinda tight spaces, but I'm sure it'll work somehow. Bring or buy your own glass and mandrels (I have some extra) and clean your own beads. I'm not saying I can teach you anything, I'm still a newbie, but if you want to come by and make a bead or three (or three dozen) we can talk about it.

Announcement regarding lawsuit against Ullja Kuntze

Not my lawsuit, though some friends were involved with it, and I helped with the fundraising for the AGLF (Artisan and Glassworker Legal Fund). I should say that I didn't write what follows, I'm just re-posting it:

June 17, 2010 Announcement (permission to repost granted):

The Plaintiffs in the defamation case Liz Putnam et al v. Ullja Kuntze have filed to withdraw their motion seeking relief against Ullja Kuntze for defamation (libel and slander per se) and fraud.

The Plaintiffs arrived at the decision to withdraw after Ullja Kuntze, with much delay, finally complied with court-ordered disclosure and provided documents confirming that she publishes the blog "handmadeartisanfraud.blogspot.com" and has made false tax evasion reports specifically naming the Plaintiffs and many others to the IRS and state revenue offices around the country.

During the legal proceedings, the Plaintiffs attempted settlement with Ullja Kuntze and requested that she remove the blog, but Ms. Kuntze refused. The high cost of pursuing the case to completion has been weighed against the satisfaction of her admission that she is the publisher of the blog and the person behind the spurious reports to local authorities against artisans around the country. The investment to date resulted in obtaining evidence of her acts, an ample and welcome reward.

However, to pursue the case to completion and obtain an injunction against Ullja Kuntze ordering her to take the blog offline would be very expensive, given her lack of cooperation to date. With proof of her wrongdoing, the Plaintiffs and others targeted by Ms. Kuntze have the needed evidence to protect their professional and personal reputations individually.

The Plaintiffs wish to thank everyone who contributed to the legal costs and to assure their supporters that with proof of Ullja Kuntze's guilt, a win in civil court is not necessary. Thanks to the support of the artisan community, the evidence of Ms. Kuntze's acts is now a matter of public record for all to see.

Case information is available online at the Harris County Clerk's website. The case number is 200966253 and can also be located searching for Defendant name "Kuntze, Ullja".

A few things happened

Since the end of last week a few things happened.

- Norman got into and out of the hospital.
- I found out that my job isn't being cut (just jet?)
- 2 batches of mixed color Jobs Tears seeds sold where I donated the proceeds to the AGLF, and there's more available in my Etsy shop.
- there are more weleweka/mgambo beads available in my Etsy shop or locally
- I have not so far found time to make more lampwork beads

for the meantime, I'm pooped. However, I'll be at work in the morning and I'll be available locally to deliver beads and stuff,and to ship orders from mo online stores.

I'm back home ...

... without any new pictures.

Eventful 10 days, that's for sure.

Monday I took Norman to the airport as he was still teaching, met with Caterina later and we had dinner together.
Tuesday I met with Michelle Courchaine (I hope I spelled that right). She showed me her studio and let me pick one of her beads (a gorgeous focal), and her cat let me pick her up and pet her, then we had a very nice lunch together, then went to Bullseye where I got some slump molds for fusing and an ashtray for Norman that is made with glass that contains ash from the 1980 Mount St. Helen's eruption (the price reflects the year: $19.80, LOL), then picked up her kids from school (like those kids!) and parted ways at her house. I called Caterina and we ate dinner together again and tried to do some shopping but were unsuccessful.
Wednesday I checked out of the hotel in Portland and drove to Seattle. The weather for the drive was mostly decent and I only got lost on a very small scale after getting to Seattle. I found Rachel's house (she said that that's a rare occurrence for people from out of town) where I stayed while I was in Seattle. Thank you soooo much again Rachel, that was fun. I got to go to class with Rachel on Thursday and played with Photoshop for the first time in my life (so maybe I could post a picture, but it isn't done. I meant to give that bead to Rachel, but Caterina had already snagged it). I (obviously) got to meet her son (another really nice kid, and we did some cooking together) and the cats, and Menace seems to like me, which is good because I was missing ours, I met some of her friends as well which I very much appreciate, we talked until all hours, and did in the end talk about the Hothead mount we'd been talking about for a while, but this time with pen and paper.
Saturday we had a small get together of lampwork people (Rachel, Gayle Himes, David Houpt and PJ whose last name I don't know) which had a bit of a crimp to it by me getting into a fender bender (a very nice lady who ended up with one of my sand beads). I would rather have spent more time with the lampwork people, but sometimes things don't work out quite as planned. David, thank you for the rose bead, and PJ, apologies for not asking whether you'd like some sand too, but as you're working with Boro and sculpting I thought you probably wouldn't (David still has the rest of the sand for all I know).
After getting through some paperwork with the rental company (I had problems understanding the people and they were always asking Rachel instead of me), returned it, Rachel had offered to take me to the airport and I much preferred that to having to get up an extra hour earlier in case I got lost.
Rachel, thank you again for everything (and the bead. I really like it. and the glass! And yes, it survived too), and for taking me to the airport this morning.
And I got to see Mount Rainier this morning - the weather in Seattle was great.

After a rather uneventful flights I got back home. All 3 cats already sat in my lap, Tsume caught another coqui frog already (he calls me like he calls the SKOD - savage kitty of death, aka Mikia'oluku III -, as if I was a cat too, but frogs are for me to deal with not for her, in spite of that I really don't mind if he teaches her to catch them too.

Everything I brought home with me survived the trip: Glass (rubino from 2 different batches!) from Rachel, the beads I got from Michelle, David and Rachel, my slump molds from Bullseye (the tools too, but I didn't doubt that), the bisque fired pottery I bought for slump molds from Georgie's, 2 big jars of Mrs. Neushin's pickles, the maple syrup and belated Christmas ornament (porcelain) from Nina, Normans old hat (he bought a new one in Portland) and I'm sure I'm forgetting something. The suitcase weighed 48 lbs (the good old "arm scale" still works rather well even outside lilikoi season) and I'm kinda glad I didn't buy glass because if I had I would have traveled with a cardboard box for my second checked baggage piece (Hawaiian style) rather than my soft bag.

I'm home, and as much fun as I had, I'm also glad to be home. My Etsy shop is back in operation, and I'm available for shipping items from my website(s) as well.

Caterina Purves, BA

Well, the picture turned out a bit pixely, but that's what you get if sitting across the whole hall with a 'normal' camera. There she is, walking back down from the stage, diploma in hand, Caterina Purves, BA, University of Portland 2010.
We had a bit of a problem finding 4 seats together and ended up on wooden bleachers way up and across from the stage - mostly due to the fact that there were a bunch of seats reserved and never occupied and a bunch of seats held by people and never occupied either. Somebody remarked later that it would have been nice if they'd had the seats assigned by age. -

And, well, that's the beads that she got out of my bead box Friday night:
It's not the greatest of pictures, but it was taken at a restaurant in Portland near Lloyd Center where we were having dinner - and it's the best one of the 5 we took.

Just realizing, I have more beads to post - and some other stuff

After selling a bunch of the beads I made last week during the week (see a post or two ago), and taking into consideration that I was/will be going to meet with a lot of family and lampwork buddies, I decided I had to make some more beads:

The small beads on the rattail I already don't have anymore, and a bunch of others with them, because our daughter snagged them last night (picture to follow in another post). The small beads are older and my first attempt of batch annealing. I wasn't sure up to what size I can batch anneal beads without having to program my kiln, so I started with the smallest ones.

Yesterday I went to Georgie's (pottery supply) and got myself some ingredients to mix my own bead release, where I'm going to follow some tips I got from Jenny Newtson and Kalera Stratton as well as a couple of pieces of bisque fired pottery to use as slump molds for fusing.

Today I did manage to go to the Convention Center where there is an exhibition and market of the Portland Art Guilds (I hope I have that right) and managed to snag some of Jennifer Millsap's time - and admire her beads in person.

Tomorrow is the day of Nina's graduation and will be taken up by that.

A custom jewelry order and my first mid-week torch session later

and with more beads in the kiln.


The necklace and bracelet arrived in California by now. It hadn't occurred to me to combine weleweka/mgambo/whatever else these go by (they have a lot of different names) with Swarovski crystals in black diamond color, but I think it turned out nice.

Tuesday I got home from work relatively early (for me at least) and as it wasn't windy for a change I decided to light my torch.

I'll admit that that was the reason why I was determined to get home early. I experimented with sand again, and made a few more attempts at encasing it. Some of it turned out nice enough.
When I took the pictures the beads were still wet and in a plastic container (that's what has the recycling mark).

Some of these are now at Susi's Creations in downtown Hilo (on Kamehameha Avenue, between the Farmer's Market and Pescatore).

Lampwork beads with sand - and others - and an update

After feeling like somebody had pulled the adrenaline plug out of me this morning (after getting the new insulin for my husband!) most of the day, I did promise to somebody that I would post the sand beads. As I experimented with a few more things than sand, there are a few more other lampwork beads as well (all of the pictures were taken before cleaning the beads - but they're cleaned now).

The first picture has only the sand beads. The biggest one doesn't show the sand well, and that's just as well as it has an internal thermal crack. I don't expect it to live. The other 3 are sortof OK for a first experiment, the two on ivory not quite matching enough for earrings, and the encasing of the teal one left some sand exposed, but I like them anyway.

The rest of the torch session went to experimenting with Effetre petrol green. I quite like the colors I got out of it, but experimenting with my torch flame at the same time, I boiled some rather badly - they have bubbles the whole way through and the beads are brittle. I'm not sure the glass is any good to even make into frit). I like the copper color, as well as the yellow I got out of it - unfortunately most of the yellow is in the boiled glass beads, so I'll have to find the right flame size and mandrel/glass position to get one without the other. I know how to make plain teal or petrol green spacers now, as torch flame goes, but the colors and not boiling the glass at the same time is a different matter. I know I can reproduce the copper color in light teal (otherwise I wouldn't have sold the second set, I really like how these turn out) and petrol green - the first time I got yellow on top of the red.

I am positively not sure whether this is a phase every lampwork newbie goes through or whether I'm just taking a scientific approach to my mistakes and try to turn it into something positive. Given my (in my opinion) non-existing lampwork skills I'm using glass that's rather inexpensive, practice, and see what I can get out of it.

I'm most certainly going to use sand again. It's just too much fun. Frit from the beach.

Oh yeah, as one pharmacy already filled one of my husband's insulin prescription the other pharmacy didn't fill the other one. Not even if he was going to pay the full price. I'm calling the medical insurance tomorrow to find out what of this is law and what of this is policies. I am really tired of people with diabetes being dependent on "just in time delivery" here. To me, my husband is my husband first and a person who happens to have type I diabetes second. The term "diabetic" is turning into a discriminative term to me. A person is a person first. If they have a so far incurable disease they at least shouldn't be discriminated against, especially not those who take good care of themselves who have this incurable disease.

P.S.: the petrol green based beads are now available at Island Edges (well, the un-broken non-brittle ones.)

Wire wrapped necklaces

Well, somebody asked so I'm posting this.
The current version of my collection necklace contains beads by (from one side to the other, left to right: Sharlyn Premuda, Nancie Osorio, Kim Neely, Kalera Stratton, Jill Knapp (not the astronomer, for those of you who got here from the astronomy side of things)), Kevan Aponte, Deborah Pierce, Gina Bucalo and Suzy Fitzwater. I love this, and I hope to add to it.



As names go, I know two ladies by the name of Jill Knapp (neither one of whom lives here, but both are regulars here), and two guys named Jonathan Kemp (both of whom live on this island for all I know) and and two named Michael (Mike) Wagner. The one I used to work with I'd love to work with again. The other one is a different matter (his wife used to work for DH). Having seen a picture of somebody by that name in somebody's office at work, there may be yet another one.

The above is my first "made from scratch" necklace. Each and every one of the lampwork beads has chipped ends. I made the beads (in too much wind), wire spiral bead caps, the jump rings and did the wire wrap. Even if the lampwork beads are rather awful, I kinda like the result.

Lampwork beads at Island Edges

After not getting around to making any beads the weekend before I did make some last Sunday. Cleaned them Monday, didn't get around to taking pictures until Friday. This is them: (click image for a bigger one, penny is for size)

It's a good thing I managed to take that picture because I don't own most of them anymore. 3 of them have chipped ends (another case of wind), so I sorted those out ahead of time. 14 of the remaining 16 are now at the downtown Hilo bead store Island Edges, which has moved. To get to Island Edges you don't have to climb stairs anymore. Island Edges/Sharon moved to another store on Keawe Street, on the makai side between Fourneaux and Haili St.(between KTA and Pescatore's, to give you landmarks), rather close to where Rock Island Gallery has moved to as well, between Kalakaua and Waianuenue.

Funny thing happened. Sharon was already closed but unlocked the door for me. While I was there Morgen (the owner of Rock Island Gallery) came by with a friend or family member, and we came to talk about our ages. Turns out, Morgen's friend's birthday is the same as mine (and I wasn't the youngest, she was). We're being there chatting, when a couple walks in. It looks like the lady bought a bunch of beads and Sharon may schedule an extra class for that lady and some friends of hers. Looks like this worked for me as well as for Sharon.

And, all my 3/32" mandrel aqua beads, reduced or not, are there now, as well as the tube that has reduced aqua on one side and non-reduced on the other. All I have left of this batch is the partially reduced petrol green with rather sooty clear on both sides, and that very round bead (it rolls) that's ivory in the middle and teal on one side and emerald on the other - and the 3 with the chipped ends.

Vacation?

So well, I'm on vacation. No, we didn't leave the island. It's a good thing too. I'll be driving back to Hilo tomorrow to take care of some stuff and so I reactivated the botanical stuff in my Etsy shop that I couldn't have shipped while on vacation otherwise.

I meant to post the first incarnation of my lampwork collection necklace weeks ago but didn't get around to it yet, and I did (I am on vacation after all) manage to take that apart and put together again, with some of my own beads wire wrapped in it as spacers. It doesn't exist anymore in the same way, but here it is/was:


As I came across a pretty awful picture of my latest lampwork beads while uploading pictures, here's a picture of those too:
At least his is only an awful picture of what I otherwise consider reasonably OK (newbie) beads.

And if you absolutely have to know this, I spent an hour or so on the phone to the telescope tonight too. And I'm so glad I got the truck fixed when I did. That's what we drove over here in. I love J&J. Called in today, can take DH's car in tomorrow, that's why I'm driving back to Hilo.

So, would you call this a vacation?
(I'll be picking up some forgotten items too, but I wouldn't have driven over for them alone)