MangoBeads Class

(I'm just going to ignore the disgustingly long gap between my last blog post and this one and pretend it never happened. *ignores the gap and pretends it never happened*)

Hello! Alright?

I'm here to tell you about the brilliant time I had teaching my class at MangoBeads in Devon. 

The class was over two days on the 9th and 10th of July and what a fab group of people it was.

Manda's workshop in Barnstaple is just so lovely. Spacious and comfy and oh so glassy. I loved it. I want to live in it. Look at all that space. And it's so tidy and organised.

The class I taught was a kind of 'improvers' class. I don't have a signature bead to teach as such, but I do have twelve years of glass-melting experience under my belt, so I went through encasing, stringer application, dots, gravity swirls, implosions and much more. Everyone did so well and they all made some great beads. We had lots of fun and many giggles. (Bertie, I will never forget your badger story for as long as I live.)

I stayed with Manda and David and they made me feel so welcome. Manda was one of my first bead customers back in the days when I used to sell my beads on eBay. We'd only met once before – fleetingly at the first UK Flame Off – but the minute I stepped off the train and into Manda's car it was like we'd known each other for always. (I hope she feels the same way or I'm going to sound like a right full-on weirdo.)

Max doing his best Princess Leia "Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?" pose

And this little fella is Max, Manda and David's adorable dachshund. We got on well too and on the final night of my stay Max got proper flirty with me on the sofa and snogged me. No really. He got very very face-licky and at one point he managed to lick the roof of my mouth. Manda and David found the whole me-trying-to-escape-the-amorous-sausage-dog-that-was-attached-to-my-head situation highly amusing.

Manda has invited me to teach again at the end of January. Again, it'll be an improvers class. If you can make a basic bead and want to have a go at encasing and other techniques to take your beads up a level, this one's for you. It would be an amazing Christmas present idea. All the details can be found on the MangoBeads website.

Big thanks to Manda and David for having me, and thank you to everyone in the class - you were so great and you all made some fabulous beads.

Factory reset

I've been in a bead funk. A long, dark, woebegone, frustrating bead funk. I've cried, I've moped, I've thrown things, I've sworn and I've cried some more but I think I can finally see a chink of light at the end of this miserable bead tunnel.

The Oatmeal did a comic about making things – in his case, creating content for social media – but if you swap that for creating beads then his comic pretty much describes how making stuff (or not) works for me.

I think I may have mentioned before that when I have one of these I-just-want-to-set-fire-to-the-shed-and-make-cake-and-eat-the-cake-whilst-huddled-in-a-corner times, I find that going back to my personal 'factory reset' colours of black, white and clear (non-colours really, I guess) helps to start the unfunking process.

My friend and fellow glass melter, Kathy (who is also known as Practical Kat and you should definitely go and look at her glassy makings) has been listening to me drone on with my bead woes and she suggested I make spacers. Nothing fancy, nothing complicated - just spacers. So I did. Black, white and clear ones. And okay, some of them have spots and stringer but the fact that I wasn't putting pressure on myself to make beads that were more complex enabled me to at least make beads, which is way more than I've been able to do this past week or so. Cheers, Kathy. You're cosmic.

The resulting 'Magpie' Beadlings are available in my shop as strands of ten.

There are also some 'Peach Tea, Blue Sky' spotty Luminobeads...

...and I dug out my ancient straight-sided lentil press and made some 'Aegean' beads. Just a little pair. Fab for earrings.

All the beads pictured can be purchased in the usual place.

I think I really am reaching the end of the miserable bead tunnel now. Well, I flipping hope I am because moping about is very tiring and unproductive. I just don't have the time or patience for it!

Thanks for reading.

Recipe: Lemon & Coconut Slice

I had the loveliest cake in Starbucks the other week. It was a lemon and coconut slice; a thin pastry-ish biscuit base topped with lemon curd and a layer of coconutty ooh. As I sat there eating it I was trying to think if I'd ever had a lemon and coconut baked good before and I honestly could not recall one. Like some kind of cake addict I went in to Starbucks again this weekend, with the sole intention of grabbing a piece of the lemon and coconut slice, but they had none. It was 'limited edition' apparently. Whatever.

A quick Google told me that lemon and coconut slice seems to be an Australian thing. Well done, Australians - I salute your wondrous cake-making skills! A lot of the recipes I found were for no-bake slices made with condensed milk but none of them seemed to have the base bit. I eventually found a couple of baked ones and I kind of melded the recipes together. The measurements were all in cups so I've converted them to good old metric which should make life a bit easier. Well, it does for me. (Cup measurements annoy me, you see.) The resulting cake has a sightly different base to the Starbucks one but it doesn't matter because it's flipping delicious.

Before I list the ingredients and give you the recipe, yes I'm aware this contains a fair amount of sugar. I know that sugar is considered heinous and toxic these days but nobody is suggesting that you make cakes every single day and eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Michaela Strachan would not be happy with this recipe (she had a benny about The Great British Bake Off last week) but that's fine because I'm not inviting Michaela Strachan round for tea and cake any time soon. Or ever, actually.

If you're feeling fancy you could make your own lemon curd for this recipe but I just used the stuff in a jar from the shop.

Lemon & Coconut Slice

Ingredients

For the base

125g unsalted butter
160g caster sugar
220g self raising flour
1 large free range egg, beaten
Lemon curd

For the coconut topping

125g dessicated coconut
160g caster sugar
1 large free range egg white

Method

Preheat your oven to 180°C (160°C for fan assisted ovens) or gas mark 4. Line a 20cm x 20cm tin with baking paper.

Base: Melt the butter in a saucepan. In a bowl, combine the sifted flour and the caster sugar. Add the melted butter and mix. Add the beaten egg and mix again. You'll end up with a fudge-like loose dough. Tip it into the lined tin and press down and level. You can use the back of a spoon or a spatula but I found it easier to use my (clean) hands. Bake the base in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes or until it is a light golden brown.

Topping: In a clean bowl, lightly beat the egg white with a whisk until it is thick and foamy. You're not making a meringue here so you're not looking for glossy stiff peaks of egg white; just whisk it until it is like dense, lathery soap. Add the dessicated coconut and caster sugar and stir it all together with a metal spoon. You should end up with a kind of crumbly mixture.

Spread the cake base with lemon curd. Two or three tablespoons of lemon curd should do the job but use as much as you fancy. Sprinkle the coconut mixture over the top. Again, I used my hands and kind of crumbled it on all over. You don't need to press it down; just make sure there's a nice even covering.

Return the tin to the oven and bake for a further 10 to 15 minutes or until the coconut topping is golden brown. Leave to cool in the tin (are there three more annoying words in baking than "leave to cool"?) and then remove the slice from the tin and cut it into as many squares or bars as you like.

I guess you could use whatever flavour jam or curd you fancy. I think raspberry or cherry would be very lovely but there's something ever so summery about the lemon and coconut combination.

Happy baking!

A splash of red

I've not been feeling very beady this last week or so, so here are some poppies instead. These are on a grassy bank next to the main road, round the corner from where I catch the bus into town.

In between trying to make beads I've been doing a lot of reading and quite a bit of garden pottering.

Books I've read are:

• The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (I say read, but I actually listened to it twice as an Audible audiobook) 5/5
• The Reunion by Amy Silver, who is also Paula Hawkins (I liked this one a lot) 4.5/5
• All I Want For Christmas by Amy Silver (chick-lit but good chick-lit) 4/5
• One Minute to Midnight by Amy Silver (fab chick-lit) 4.5/5
• Black Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin (amnesia thriller) 4/5

And I am halfway through The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty, which is a thriller set in Australia.

I guess I should stop reading and typing about reading because this blog post really is about nothing, and I should try and go and make some beads instead.

See you later!

Rant, jewellery, lovely calming strawberry flower

Occasionally I get an urge to make jewellery with my beads. I often feel bad about this because a while back some delightful Facebook commenter told me I should stick to making beads and leave the jewellery-making to other people. Wasn't that so very lovely of her? Yeah yeah, love, I know the jewellery I make is the basic-looking, plain-strung, unfancy, not silversmithed, no PMC, no clever knotting, no additional stones or crystals or whatever kind of jewellery, but I make the sort of jewellery that I like to wear, and I have always loved wearing simple and unfussy jewellery, OK?

*clambers 'pon soapbox*

Seriously, people need to think twice before giving unsolicited advice, or passing 'helpful' throwaway comments on the work created by craftspeople and makers. Whatever you think of it, that person has made something with their hands and their heart and they've had the balls to put it out there for the world to see, and therefore judge. Unless the maker is asking for advice or a critique on their work, people shouldn't give them negative feedback. If you have nothing nice or encouraging to say to someone about what they've made, hush up and move on. The brains of creative people are often weird things and they can be pretty flipping sensitive and over-analytical, making their owners doubt themselves and their abilities. Creativity is easily damaged or affected by thoughtless words, including ones about pricing.

*gets off soapbox*

Anyway, I pushed that commenter's words aside in my brain and this weekend I let myself make a couple of bracelets.

For some reason I made even more of those spotty red lentils (I think I'm just in love with their redness) so I decided to turn some of them into a bracelet and matching earrings.

I also made some little 9mm diameter spacer beads in sea glass colours of pale aqua, pale green and clear.

I used hair-fine grey stringer to wrap each one with a trail of glass. The beads were then tumble-etched to a satin finish before I turned them into a bracelet.

All of these pieces are currently in my shop.

Sorry to have got a bit ranty on you there. I didn't intend to. I only sat down to write a blog post to show you my jewellery but I let my fingers type out the festering irkedness I had in my brain about the whole jewellery making thing. Ah well, better out than in and all that.

May your Tuesday be as sunshiny as the one I'm currently experiencing here. I think I'm going to mow the lawn, carefully avoiding the wild strawberries I mentioned in my last post.

I've been reading about how to transplant wild strawberries into pots so I might give that a go too. *Carol Klein face*

Have a good rest of the day!