Midwest Creative Collective

http://www.lampworketc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=95388

I’m posting this link with Andrew’s blessings.  If you are interested in learning to silver line beads this is a wonderful tutorial.  The pictures are great!  Andrew was very generous with his time and information with this and we owe him a bit THANK YOU, ANDREW!!!

I haven’t been feeling very creative lately. On top of all the usual economic woes and job seeking issues, my daughter has been deployed to Iraq. In the midst of learning to deal with being an Army mom my muse seems to have become very quiet. Not altogether silent but pretty danged hard to hear.
So, to work my way around this issue I’ve taken to sitting at my torch and practicing new techniques, or trying techniques that I’ve read about but not been shown.
I haven’t been able to spend as much time as usual at the torch but the latest technique I’ve been playing with has been hollow vessels. I was gifted with a 1/4″ hollow mandrel and, since I like to work small I got some 1/8″ tubing and made 3 more hollow mandrels of that size.
I’ve made about four different vessels so far and I’m enjoying the heck out of it. It’s like I can’t believe I’m making them, you know.
They certainly aren’t ready for selling yet but I will wear the first one I made. That one’s mine and no one else gets it. LOL
No pictures, yet. I want to make a couple more and then take pictures of all of them to show my progress and improvements. All except for the one I had to break off the mandrel because I wasn’t careful enough keeping the bead release all the way to the end of the mandrel. That’s a good lesson learned.
When I’m comfortable I want to make a few Christmas ornaments and then a few hollow globe pendants. The hollow globes are because my daughter sent me 2 carats worth of teeny tiny accent diamonds and I think it would be very cool to put five or six in a globe pendant. And of course, when I mentione my idea to my daughter, she wants one too. LOL

I am on a hat making kick here lately.A girl can never have too many hats.

Next I need to learn to make shoes LOL! My hat making started all because of

my silly 5 year old daughter Emily who LOVES hats! She asked me if I could make a hat bead

so I had to give it a go!

Oh my, what a great class!  JC is an absolute sweetheart, a fabulous teacher and makes some beads that are just TDF.  Know those gorgeous egg shaped beads of hers?  I know how to make them.  hahahaha!  LOL  Know that amazing stringer control she has?  I don’t have that at all but I got better.  LOL

She does the most amazing enamel work.  It’s different from other classes I’ve taken where we’ve used enamels and I loved what we did.  She’s also a stickler about safety.  The nurse in me loves that.  No one should ever be using enamels without an N-100 mask on.  Breathing in minute glass particles is a really bad idea.

I think I’ll just show the pics.  I’m not going to give away any of her ’secrets’ here.  I can’t wait to have some torch time to just sit and play and take notes.

 JC introducing herself and telling us a little of her ‘glass history.’

 She’s the only one of us who looked cute wearing the N-100!

 We were like flies on **** with her gorgeous beads.

  More…

 JC making a bead.

 Back row: Sachiko, Robin and Kathie

                                                                            Front row:  Jennifer, Mari and JC 

I fortuately was the photographer.  I wanted to get a picture of all of us with our masks on and forgot.  I was so fascinated with watching JC actually make the beads that I don’t have pics of those either.

If you ever have a chance to take a class with JC, DO IT! 

Hi all, I’ve been fusing like crazy lately, and thought maybe I’d share some of my favorites with you. I have a series I call “The Missing Piece”. Here a some of my most recent “Pieces”.

This next one is larger, it will be framed as a finished piece.

Hope you all like them as much as I do. They are in my Etsy store. http://www.iwantonetoo.etsy.com

Sheri

Have you ever felt that way? Last week I was faced with forcing myself to be creative and it was one of the toughest things I’ve had to do.

There is an art show I have attended with my mother every year for the past 17 years. It’s always been a dream of mine to be in the show but I never really felt my work was up to the task.

This year I decided I wanted to apply. I kept rolling the ideas around in my head. The show has many jewelry artists exhibiting and a few lampworkers so competition is tough. I knew I had to really come up with some “WOW” stuff to even be considered. My slides that have gotten me into shows in the past just didn’t seem good enough.

The closer the deadline came, the less creative I felt. It was so much pressure. Like a gun to my head with myself saying “Create Dammit!”. I kept procrastinating, allowing myself to be distracted by any little thing. It was not going well.

As the midnight deadline approached (last Friday) I was sitting at my kitchen table with a huge mess of beads, fibers, cords, wire, you name it, it was in the pile. I had made and taken apart countless ideas that just didn’t work out. I was mad, in tears, frustrated. I knew whatever it was I had to finish it, then take it downstairs and photograph it, then come back to the computer to resize it, then upload it to their site and submit my application.

Finally I got an idea with potential! I’ll bet a light bulb really appeared above my head. I started furiously braiding my cord, bending wire, stringing beads… then I got an idea for a matching bracelet. I was pushing it time wise (it was 10PM) but I could do it!

At 10:30 I raced downstairs and my husband was all set with the lights on and the camera ready to go. With a few quick clicks I was back at my computer resizing… wait a minute! There’s a hair right in the middle of it. Dog hair, cat hair, someone’s hair! Down the stairs again… re shoot the pictures. I can feel I’m running out of time. I’m panicking.

I made it back to the computer to resize again and click on the ’submit’ button and the page just sits there… loading… forever it seemed. Suddenly I was kicked back to the main page and when I tried to resubmit my application I received the error message that the show was closed for entries.

I cried… and cried… and cried. I felt like I had run a marathon all day long and tripped 5 feet from the finish line. I was so frustrated, mad at myself for procrastinating, for not being more creative.

Before going to bed I decided to e-mail the show and just see if they might possibly accept any late entries. I know some will and you have to pay a higher application fee but at this point the site wasn’t even allowing any applications. So I put my whole story out there to this generic e-mail address and went to bed feeling defeated. I was hoping for the best but not expecting it.

I received an e-mail back two days later. She told me she would ‘try’ to reopen the application process later in the week, but no promises.

It’s too late to make this long story short but I’ll wrap it up… she DID reopen that section of the site and I was able to submit my application. Whether or not I’m chosen to be in the show, I’ll always remember how this set came to life and use it as a reminder. A reminder that procrastination is bad… a reminder that creativity isn’t forced, it flows… a reminder to never give up… and a reminder that if a door closes, find another one to open.

I hope reading this helps you all to remember those things too.

I named this ‘On My Horizon’…

This is me making a simple implosion pendant.  The video is about 10 minutes long.

Love and challenges. I learned a little something about this recently. Sometimes love can really be challenging, and in many different ways.

I was doing a trunk show recently, and a woman saw one of my vessel pendants. Casually, she asked if I could make one in a heart shape. Intrigued, I said that I would try, not really sure how I would go about this challenge.

She went on to explain that not long ago her son, who was in his early twenties, suddenly died, and she wanted a vessel to put some of his ashes in so she could carry him with her always. Of course this made me even more determined that I would create a vessel for her that is worthy of it’s duty.

This was definitely a challenge to figure out how to make the shape out of a blown vessel. It took me several attempts and a couple of weeks, but I finally got it to work out. Here are some of the “prototypes”:

The first one I tried in boro and it didn’t quite work. The second one in soft glass wasn’t any better and I didn’t even bother to put handles on it. (There were a couple of other attempts that aren’t even worth photographing!) I was getting really frustrated until the third one, and the shape came out nicely, but unfortunately it had collapsed down too much and is not hollow. Finally on a roll, I created these two:

Now this is what I’m talking about! She chose the one on the right, which is a little smaller than the left. Seeing the bittersweet look in her eyes was justification for all the effort I put into this.

While I was working on this challenge, I thought about how loving can really be a challenge. Whether it be a spouse, significant other, child or pet, loving comes with definite ups and downs. What my client just went through definitely makes one think if it’s even worth it to risk loving. Fortunately for most of us, our hearts won’t let us choose – it tells us that without loss, we may never appreciate the love we share with the targets of our affection.

Many of us will tell our loved ones today that they are loved. But let’s not let that end with just today. Take every opportunity to tell the special ones around you that you love them and that they mean a lot to you.

So to you I say: “I love you and you are very special to me!”

I took a class last week that just blew my mind. The class was two days with Brent Graber at Mari’s studio. It was my very first time melting borosilicate glass (Deb calls it “the dark side”) and while I’m still excited and intrigued by glass every day this was a whole new level of WOW!

As far as sculpting and shaping goes, it seems easier. It’s far more stiff than soft glass and easier to freeze that exact moment in time. It’s less shocky and more forgiving. The hard part comes in getting the good color, as far as I can tell.

So one week after the class and boro is all I can think about. I’m getting tanked oxygen in my studio today (my oxycon isn’t strong enough) and I can’t wait to go play. I’m taking all boro to open torch tomorrow and perhaps I’ll even work on my implosions, which were dreadful in class. I hope to try some mandrels too since all I did was off mandrel in the class.

The picture is a heart Brent made for me. I tried to buy one from him in Tucson last year. I wasn’t crazy about the colors he had left and I wanted horns on mine so he said he would make one. I waited and waited, reminded and cajoled… but in typical artist fashion, he just never got it to me. I mentioned this in class, of course, and he said he would make me one before class was over. True to his word I sat right behind him while he created this. I told him I wanted the horns, the wings AND the tail. You can never have enough cow bell, right? After he finished I took a look and it’s the most gorgeous heart I’d ever seen. He wouldn’t even let me pay him for it. He also gave away everything he made in the class.

Thanks to Brent for the heart and for turning me onto boro and very special thanks to Mari, who insists I’m a boro savant even though I don’t feel like one. I’ll post pics of what I create at open torch. Perhaps not only can you watch me create, you can watch my work evolve!