Etsy, once again!

Workity Work! That’s what I’ve been doing. And unburying myself from an ever-growing pile of email. But I’m not complaining! Keep them coming.

More good stuff for Etsy… I got a really early start today. Today was decidedly a picture kind of day. I was fiddling with Mr. Sarah’s camera to see how it would do if mine ever died. It happens to be a great camera, but I still need to figure a few things out. I wonder if you can tell any difference in these photos? I took all of my photos today with the Panasonic Lumix (his) while I normally take all of my photos with my old Olympus. I can’t tell any difference in the edited versions, but I do know for sure the editing process was a little different between the two.

Anyway, here they are! Click HERE to visit my shop, or click on the thumbnails below for each individual listing.

boro tab trio - click me

 

scintillez des pommes - click me

 

spring morning - click me

You may notice that I used very similar colors for the Spring Morning and Scintillez des Pommes sets… the three new Effetre colors I babbled about earlier.

Well, it’s springtime… you know what that means? I must go on Ant Patrol post haste. I loathe those little buggers. Fred discovered them and told me about it (he’s such a good little hunter) and luckily, they haven’t reached a state of out of control quite yet. Time to get out the mop and the Terro gel. Ugh.

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Etsy!

I told you I needed a nap. I don’t know about anyone else, but this Daylight Savings crapola threw me for a major loop. It does every time. And sometimes it takes me weeks to recover from it. I think it needs to go away before I have a freaking heart attack.

Anyway… I hope all the tick-tocking and throat clearing were worth these piddly, belated offerings.

Click HERE to visit my shop, or click on the thumbnails below to see each individual listing.

colorblast hana seascape - click me

colorblast mirror dot mod pods - click me

 

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Etsy later tonight

Because if I don’t have a nap right Now, I may seriously jack something up. I’m so sleepy I forgot to turn the macro on for photos. Imagine my blurry confusion when I loaded the first batch to review and edit. Good thing I already have today’s beads made.

Later on…

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Sorry, kids…

…I should have known.

The new colors I ordered from Frantz, which I mentioned last week, are indeed a bit different. 426 (Zucca Dark) is the same…

591426 zucca dark

…but 425 (Zucca Light) is quite different, as you can see. Definitely nothing like the Red Roof Tile Ocher tonality I was sent last year.

591425 zucca light

 The Apple Blush is slightly different, as well, but I do have hope, because of the subtle apricot rings.

591411 apple blush

Here is a comparison:

comparison

But hey, I’m not complaining. NEW COLORS! Oh, and I got a little bit of the 591091 Oliva Nera and the 591032 Verde Rosetta, and they’re both extremely dense transparents. At first glance, they look black, but if you hold them up to the light, the color is more visible, but still very dark. They both look like they would work best thinned out. I can’t wait to try them! I got a little bit of the 591219 Mint, and it looks a lot like Copper Green. The 591727 Choco-Lotta is another very dense opaque, a reddish brown in rod form, but we’ll see what it really is once I’ve melted it.

So, I got on a serious roll last night, and worked until the tank was empty. That went on until about 6am, so that means the beads weren’t cool enough to take photos for Etsy this afternoon. Tomorrow, for sure.

See you then!

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HOORAY FOR SPRING!

Last Friday it reached a balmy seventy-something degrees, on the last day of winter. So guess what we got Saturday, on the first day of spring? SNOW with blizzard-like conditions! They’d been talking about it all last week, but I refused to take it seriously. It’s nearly April, for crying out loud, and surely, the only thing we’d have to worry about would be slush. But this “massive” winter storm the weather guys predicted brought us at least a couple of inches of snow, and a lot of wind. It sounded like Kubrick’s production of The Shining out there Saturday morning, and I swore I could hear Mr. Hallorann driving up the mountain in his snowcat to rescue us from our snowbound insanity. (but it was probably just the paper boy and his mom in her conversion van.) And what’s really grand is that I had a hair appointment that day, but my stylist called and rescheduled. What’s funny is that I had a hair appointment on the day the last massive winter storm hit town, too. What are the Hair Gods trying to tell me? I just have to remember it’s still March, and winter always squeezes in one last hurrah before April comes around, whether it’s technically spring or still winter. But yesterday, it was back up to 61 degrees, and the snow had completely melted by the time I got up at 2pm. Hilarious. Why bother?

Since this snow storm didn’t bring excruciatingly bitter cold, I went ahead and worked all weekend. I’ve been working on orders pretty much nonstop over the last two weeks. I managed to fall about a week behind at the beginning of the month, but since it’s been warmer over this last little bit (until yesterday and today, of course) my spirits have picked up, and I’ve been able to get a remarkable amount of work done. Even some house cleaning. Anyway, do keep an eye out for new Etsy listings Wednesday or Thursday evening, but I’m still too buried under made to orders to even consider another Superstars sale for a little bit.

Bleh, work, work, work. I don’t have much to say when I’m work-work-working. I’ve been too busy to even sit still and really read through the most recent publication my beads were included in, Totally Twisted by Kerry Bogert. 

What little I’ve read I really enjoyed – she expresses her own, different way of doing things, and explains why you’ll want to do (or avoid) certain things. I really like that, because I like to know *why*. I really need to take some time to read through the whole thing. Since wire and I don’t exactly get along, I think I’ll learn a few things, for sure.

It’s looking like I’ll be caught up on orders by the end of this week, so hopefully, I’ll have a little more time to chat with you guys here pretty soon.

Thanks for checking in!

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tuesday…

…I woke up to two payment notifications from Paypal that should have been sent 6 days earlier, a cool gal in Canada telling me that she FINALLY got the beads I mailed to her nearly THREE weeks ago, mailing list signups, and more confirmed orders in my inbox. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had practically no email. It’s weird how that goes. I also found out that Kate McKinnon is having another web sale. I spied a ring made with one of my beads the other day (but by the looks of things, it’s already sold) so you might want to check out her Big Cartel shop. I see some really great clasps there right now.

There was no Etsy tonight, kids. Sorry to disappoint. I’ve glued my rear end to my chair, and my eyes to my order queue. I spent several hours on the computer Monday night, and it was the first work day in over a week that I didn’t make beads. I’m finally getting some not-so-fun computer stuff DONE. Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent less and less time in front of the computer, which is why I’m still scratching my head about my grand idea to have this blog.

I was awake less than an hour before I got on the phone with Frantz Art Glass to place an order for NEW COLORS! (I had already ordered some new-to-me colors last week, so I’ll be getting a good bunch of new stuff over the next little bit.) I’m on their mailing list, but I managed to miss the announcement of these new colors, because it was disguised as a clever story about a pot of gold, with a link that completely escaped my notice on the day I received the notification. Duh. This morning, my friend Florence told me that at one of the colors I’d been anticipating had finally arrived, and I found the others shortly after. I got a free sample pack containing a few of these colors with a purchase several months ago, and wished and hoped that they weren’t a one-time thing. My favorites:

591411 Effetre Apple Blush (aka Giallo Ocra)

591425 Effetre Zucca, Light (aka Zucca Chairo)

591426 Effetre Zucca, Dark (Zucca Scuro)

All 3 have a consistency/workability similar to Red Roof Tile, and the colors are quite powerful. The rods are smooth with very rich, dense dimensional colors, and have an odd stiffness in the flame. The Apple Blush is the strangest one of all – it’s a bright acid green with blushes of apricot. The Zucca Light is practically a dead ringer for Red Roof Tile OCHER. (remember those batches? if you’ve been jonesing for the RRTO, get a little bit of this stuff and see what you think.) The Zucca Dark is similar to the medium orange 420 corals in color, but again, much more dense and smooth, and a more dimensional mottling of color. If you were one of those who got that sample pack so many months ago, you might keep in mind that what they have now may not be identical to what we got in the sample pack. I’m anxious to see what I get, since I ordered 2lbs of each one of the 3 listed above. I guess I was in the mood to take some risks, woohoo. They also have other new colors that look interesting, including a rich transparent sable brown that I’m excited to see in action. You can see them all HERE.

Man, I just love Italian glass. Some people find the idiosyncracies irritating, like varying sensitivities, viscosities and batch differences. As long as the glass isn’t full of bubbles and stones, I welcome these differences. (but if the color is wonderful enough, I’ll find a way to live with bubbles and stones.)  I’ll say it again – if you like something, make sure you buy as much of it as you can, while you can, because it may not be there next year.

I also recommend not letting yourself completely run out of the standard production colors before ordering more. You never know when, for instance, the Effetre 026 Teal might be different, and if you’ll need the older version for something specific. I bought Effetre 026 Teal sometime last year and found that it was more green than any teal I’d ever bought before. I will tell you that Vetrofond’s version of 026 Teal is a bit more blue than Effetre’s more recent excuse for teal, and in my application, isn’t too noticeably different than Effetre’s “real teal” and works just fine. Luckily, I do have several rods left of Effetre (real) Teal, and loads of nubs and shorts that I can use if I get desperate. Maybe some day I’ll take a photo of the plastic storage container full of shorts and nubs. Yes. Storage container.

Meanwhile, thanks for checking in. Sorry I’ve been so quiet…

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ETSY!

Yep, better late than never…

Click HERE to see my shop, or click on each thumbnails below to see each individual listing.

rhodochrosite - click me!

 

boro hana mini - click me!

 

ocher flames flower spikes - click me

 

retro gold optical ellipses - click me

 Back to work with me… two days of beads to clean. Thank goodness I don’t make spacers or I’d really have my work cut out for me…

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Dang.

Life. Sometimes, you just have to deal with it, and it takes days. You know?

But there are a ton of young cardinals living in the trees near our bedroom, and things are looking up. However, I’m not so thrilled about that mockingbird. It couldn’t possibly be the same one that’s taken up residence directly outside our bedroom window every spring/summer for the last several years – surely they don’t live that long, and if they did, surely some not-so-nice people kill them before they have the chance to reach their life expectancy – so it must be a prime spot. Seriously. Mockingbirds seem to have a penchant for staying up ALL NIGHT and singing at the top of their little birdy lungs. (Did you know that one of Ellen Degeneres’ DJ’s broke his leg, climbing onto his roof, trying to get one to shut up? The mockingbird sitch is definitely a thing.) Sounds a little bit like someone else I know, but hey, at least I’m not outside, singing in the tree.

The boro is put away, and my beloved soulmate soda lime glass is back out to play. Nice. The bead orders have been coming in at a steady pace, so last Thursday evening, I knew in my gut it was time to be done with boro. I hadn’t been feeling it most of last week anyway, and couldn’t torture myself with it any longer. I feel like I’m taking a big risk every time I work with it. I just hoped I’d have something worthy of sale after I cleaned everything up and strung it all together. My gut rarely steers me in the wrong direction, and my gut was also telling me it would all work out in the end… and it did. I have some fabulous sets put together! I actually surprised myself. I didn’t think I had been productive at all. They all ended up particularly chunky. I’ve been in a weird fog. Having no made-to-orders to tie me down to reality isn’t necessarily a good thing. It only took me about two beads to get warmed up on the soda lime again, and now, I’m getting on track with the orders. So, I may be a little quiet here for the next several days, besides the Etsy update later today… but then again, with me, who knows.

OH! And for the last several days, I’ve neglected to mention that the new 2010 Gallery on my website is live and there are already 3 pages! Check it out.

Thanks for stopping by, see you later today!

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Hooray For Progress!

We have successfully moved my site to the new web host. Sites like WordPress, Etsy and evidently, my web host, don’t like dashes. Like z-beads, for example. Sure, you can use them in certain areas, but when it comes to file folders and file names, nyuh-uh. That hung us up. But it’s “progress”. Humm? How is not being able to use an exclamation point or a dash “progress”? Ask the World Wide Web Consortium. Can you imagine what THOSE guys might be like? One good thing about this new web host is that I’ll be able to host my own blog, make whatever changes I want to it (like larger, more readable text – won’t that be nice?) That’s why I chose WordPress to begin with, even though Blogspot is more user friendly with lots of little extras that WP doesn’t have. (turns out Blogspot isn’t quite as secure as WP because of those little extras.) With WP, it’s easier to transfer your blog as-is if you decide to host it yourself, which I knew I would be doing at some point. And if you host it yourself and know a little bit about CSS, you have a lot more control over the appearance of your blog. (don’t ask me what CSS is. All I know is that it stands for Cascading Style Sheets, that you need to know something about it if you want any control over your fonts, and that’s about it. I’ll be learning about it whether I want to or not.)

Anyway, as far as we know, everything is working properly. I have so many files that Dreamweaver’s connection to my FTP during the site upload kept timing out, and things kept being missed. We’re pretty sure everything is there now, however, if you’re looking at my site a week from now and stumble upon a broken link or a page that leads to any sort of error page, please do give me a holler. In some cases, some of the info may not have completely (populated, propagated, whichever one it is) all the servers on the net, so you may run across an oddity or two over the next few days. At least the big stuff is working, like all the pages linked to the main index, including the Superstars page…

And there will be another Superstars sale this Thursday. Barring any unforseen disasters, that is. It seems like it’s always SOMETHING lately. I have enough stock for this upcoming sale, plus a little something for Etsy next Tuesday. (the next SS sale may be about a month away, depending on how efficient I am.) Next week I’ll return to the soda lime, which I’m really looking forward to. I already have a loooong list of orders to fill, and I’ve missed filling orders over the last 2 months. I’m dreaming of bright corals, ochers, Fizz Tabs and metallic raindrops. The boro palette doesn’t pop the way Effetre and Vetrofond pop, and I honestly don’t get the big hoo-ha over my boro beads. Sure, they’re nice, but sheesh.

Speaking of boro beads, check out this necklace. Yes, Finally. This is the one that didn’t win me any prizes in the first contest I ever bothered to enter:

I plan on framing the rejection letter as a reminder of how silly it is for someone like me to bother with contests. Perhaps it wasn’t prize-worthy, and I can live with that. But the hassle of getting the photo printed, mounting the photo, writing about the piece, filling out the form, etc., etc., was too much. I have beads to make! But I’ve already sold these beads, and that made me pretty happy and entailed very little hassle. I’ll just stick to that.

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Well, actually….

… It’s not that I HATE the Olympics or that they exist. I admire the athletic talent and I do agree that the athletes deserve to be rewarded for it. No argument there. (I don’t think people who watch are idiots, either, but it does amaze me how some people lose their words when I tell them I don’t care about the Olympics.) What really peeves me is all the hype, and that they’re on 14+ hours a day for two weeks. And if they’re not on, the morning hens are bock-bocking about the peacoat so-and-so is wearing when she’s not on the slope, and where you can get a decently priced knockoff. Or something just as inane, and on every freaking station. Don’t people realize that this kind of crap (and Top 40 music) is elegantly designed by High Media to rot our brains and turn us into compliant little robots?

I am exceptionally peeved that Days of our Lives had been running at 1PM CT (rather than the usual 2PM), and I didn’t even realize it for the first week. So that means it’s been on at the same time as One Life To Live. Oh, well. The sly, often subtle comedy and intelligent vocabulary on OLTL blows Days away, so it was an easy choice to record that rather than Days. Silly me, I assumed they wouldn’t be showing Days again until after the hype-fest was over, just like every other laughably mediocre program NBC has put on hold during the Olympic season. But hey, at least they were kind enough to let us watch their worst programs uninterrupted and at their regularly scheduled time: local news, Today, and Rachael Ray. Hooray for small miracles. But… but… my routine has been interrupted! Shouldn’t planet Earth screech to a halt and throw us all into outer space at a zillion miles an hour because MY daytime soap schedule has been DISRUPTED?

Okay, fine. I’ll just watch Days online, no prob. Really. So I watched about 4 episodes last week while I worked at the computer, and while they did have very short (but frequent) commercial breaks, they only had about 6 ads total. And guess what the most frequently run ad was for? THE FREAKING OLYMPICS. I mean, I guess it was for the Olympics – it had fanfare-y yet poignant music with a montage of children dressed up like ice skaters and snowboarders and the 5 ring signature was plastered all over everything. It was like having one of those nightmares where I’m trying to escape someone, and just when I thought I’d gotten away, there they are again, right in my face. I decided not to remember whatever corporate glom the ad was really for, so that I could enjoy at least a tiny morsel of victory over the situation. I still have a week of Days to catch up on before I watch today’s episode later this evening, but the thought of sitting through those ads makes me want to just read the recaps. Reading won’t take nearly as long or be nearly as annoying… and we are talking about a soap opera here, after all. I probably didn’t miss too much of anything.

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