Showing posts with label sponge coral. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sponge coral. Show all posts

Friday, 13 June 2014

Two Works in Progress...

Didn't get much done this week, except breaking up and pricing strings and strings of beads for The Gem Expo. I always underestimate how long this will take and this year I am determined to start sooner working on items than two days before the show. Must getting old here: my days of pulling all-nighters are long gone. Sigh...

In the meantime, Nancy came over this morning and we played with beads. Here are just two of the things we came up with.

Still needs tweaking, but for now, Chinese turquoise (of which I have lots for the show), raw lapis from Afghanistan via Nelson Gemstones via the Tucson Bead Show and sponge coral separated by handmade African brass and copper beads. This is a fairly heavy necklace, but if it's custom-fitted, it's very wearable.



This got restrung a couple of times, but I think it's a keeper: hand-carved rectangular/angular soapstone and some fairly decent labradorite rounds with a few pewter spacers. It's so hard to get labradorite beads all firing at the same time when photographing them.



Got some earrings to make for the market, as well, this evening. My favourite basket of flowers...



Thanks for looking!

Tuesday, 9 October 2012

Yikes! 2.5 weeks until...

...the Grand River Bead Society Show on the 27th and 28th in Guelph! Check out the classes here.

I'm busy pricing my new shipment of Kingman turquoise. Please let me know if you want half or one-third strings of these or any of my other turquoise (Sleeping Beauty, Nacozari, Castle Dome, Hubei, Ma'an Shan). I will also have a small selection of individual beads to choose from. I will be posting more pictures as I split them up and I will be happy to reserve them for you to pick up at the show.

Kingman blue mini-nuggets and 5mm blue heishi...


Kingman boulder barrels and rondelles...


Tube heishi (unknown provenance), Kingman blue and green heishi...


Sleeping Beauty, 1/3 string, 13 beads, $35...

Sponge coral, various sizes, shapes, prices...


Thanks for looking and see you at the show!

Sunday, 24 June 2012

A simply great Saturday at the market and how my garden grows on Sunday...

Just saw this... http://theflyingtortoise.blogspot.ca/2012/06/beautiful-bohemian-interiors-of.html This is how I want the interior of my (as yet unbought, let alone found) RV to look. Sigh......... 

I had a great day at the market yesterday. I sold my first Kingman turquoise heishi necklace.




As well as an adjustable pipestone choker and bracelet.


These beads were from Titan Beads and yet again I only bought the one string, and a half-string at that. Ditto the pewter saucer beads. I'm almost or completely out of all of the metal beads I bought there in the spring and they don't appear on their website. I have to remember to email them, see if they have any lurking or will be able to get more in. I believe I got the round beads from Arton, my go-to people for so many things. I cannot get over how useful all these metal beads are mixed in with semi-precious beads and the rough-looking beads in particular. The character changes constantly as they're combined and recombined, hence the riffs on just one bead of the previous few weeks. I would have done more variations of this set, but I have no more of the pipestone.

I'm finally remembering to bring my camera every week to the market as a lot of things I make while I'm sitting waiting for customers for some reason will sell on the spot before even hitting the table. I'll show what I'm working on to anybody that stops, "Hey, check this out. What do you think?" and very often they tell me they'll take it. I still find that totally amazing.

I was so pleased with my sales yesterday that I bought three more baskets of flowers from Boris. I now have ten and so far they've managed to survive being drowned in monsoons, sauteed in the humidity and baked every day in the sun, although there is a lot of shadow cast by the building throughout the morning and end up in direct sun for only a few hours until the big maple tree to the west casts its long shadow over all, which helps as well to keep the living room fairly cool if there's no humidity. Humidity is the killer but with the tree blocking the sun I still rarely have my fan on at more than low speed. I am scrupulous about keeping the plants watered multiple times per day this year. I tried to have plants outside the porch door but it's far too hot there with direct sun all day after 10 a.m. or so.

I just went out to take pictures of the deck, got one photo and of course the camera batteries are now out of juice.

...half an hour later...

Max shaking his head over the folly of having so many plants.



Oh, well, I guess She Who Feeds Me could have ten cats instead...



One of the first planters I bought. The wave petunias are really taking off...



The new and super lushly planted wave petunia basket...


Time to get to work and finish another long 7-strand seed bead necklace, this time in turquoise blue with yellowy-oranges and red splotches. I've just discovered that I can't get any more opaque yellow-orange seed beads, or at least no store I've been to in this region carries them. This particular yellow-orange colour was from a 25-plus-year-old stash of seed beads. Ain't it always the case, the most useful item in your arsenal is always guaranteed to be out of stock, if not permanently out of production.

Thanks for looking, and if you want to commission similar items to what I've shown here or elsewhere, please email me.