Unplanned

These were a bit of a happy accident - I was twiddling about with dot designs and slowly these evolved. I made about ten beads before I stumbled upon this design.

It's a complex bead to make and relies on good dot placement and encasing to make it work properly. I made a few that were slightly wonky - I discovered that if the dots aren't just right and the encasing isn't done in a particular way then the desired effect isn't achieved.

I'm mighty, mighty pleased with these!

TwinklePebbles

Tonight's new beads - little flat pebbles dusted with enamel and set with cubic zirconias.

Saturday night's shindig was good. Photos were taken but they're awful so I won't be posting any! I hate, hate, hate having my photograph taken.

Jewellery Bashing

In the old Star Wars movies several props were made by taking model kits of aeroplanes, cars and the like and cutting them all up and re-assembling them to create fantastic spacey-looking things. One example of this is the trench in the Death Star run in Episode IV. Anyway, I won't start on that but I'll just point out that the model kit re-assembly process is referred to as 'kit bashing'.

Why am I talking about this?

Well, sometimes when I'm out and about shopping I quite often see cheap and nasty jewellery that occasionally contains interesting-looking components. The jewellery itself is tat - base metal and usually very poorly put together (don't I sound like a snob?!) but bits of it are pretty nonetheless.

I wanted to make some earrings to wear to this shinding tonight. My shoes and bag are pale gold but I couldn't find any nice gold jewellery. So I took these crystal links out of a cheap pair of earrings that I bought, some glass drops from another pair, re-wired everything on sterling as I'm allergic to gold and threw in some Swarovskis for good measure! Ta da! New earrings.

So for all you jewellery designers out there who don't do 'jewellery bashing' as I call it, you should give it a go. It's fun!

Two more

Here are another two silver core beads. One is similar to the one I posted last night and the other is one of my enamel beads.

I'll tell you what, parting with these is going to be quite tricky. I don't usually spend that much time with my beads. By that I mean that I normally make them, clean them, photograph them and then they're away off to new homes in various parts of the world. But these little glass gems get a considerate amount of my time and attention lavished on them after the cleaning process. I talk to them while I'm doing the silver coring thing, normally pleading with them to turn out okay and not to smash! Then I sand, clean and polish the silver core and finally the completed bead gets a bath and a good buff with a polishing cloth. These are pampered beads indeed!

But I realise that I do have to part with them and I'm sure that they will go to extremely good homes. I was going to wait until I had a huge mountain of silver core beads before I started selling them but I've had a bucketload of emails asking when they're going to be available so I shall start the ball rolling tonight and these two will be for sale on my website at 8.30pm (GMT) this evening.

My first 'proper' Silver Core

Here it is! It's been a long while but I've finally cracked (along with a gazillion beads!) the silver coring process. This is the first one that I'm totally 100% pleased with and it is currently residing on my Pandora bracelet. Yes - a Laurabead for me!

My silver core beads will be available to buy on my website in the very near future. I shall let you know as soon as I add them to the site.