Etsy...

My Etsy shop is finally OPEN! Only a couple of beads in there so far, but new ones will be added all the time, so keep checking back.

Ooh, I feel like I should be opening a bottle of Champagne!

The clocks have gone back

And the question is...

Did you have an extra hour partying?

Or an extra hour in bed?

My bed was very warm and cosy this morning :)

Bead envy

Now when I'm not making beads, I like to look at other people's beads. And, because I'm only human, I sometimes find myself succumbing to one of the deadly sins - envy. I look at beautiful beads with precise, evenly spaced dots and lovely thin stinger designs and I think, "why can't I do that"? I do try every now and then, but it just doesn't happen. And you know why? It's not 'me'. I don't do neat and precise. I'm not a straight lines sort of person. Just ask my collegues at work, who must despair of my hanging-posters-in-the-window-in-a-straight-line skills!

The truth is, I love organic wonkiness. I love the unpredictability of glass, the way I can add some (wonky) stringer to a bead and then let gravity take over...and just see what happens! I love to be surprised. Sometimes, if a bead is looking a little bit too symmetrical and evenly shaped, I have to squish it about or add raised dots, frit or murrini just to random it up a bit. I guess if I have a style, that's it. Organic shapes, nuggets and swirly gravity designs.

Just like these ones...a  moon bead with a swirly, silvery sky and random murrini;

And this organically shaped simple white bead, with veins of silvered ivory.

On Ebay right now :o)

Am I boring you?

I do hope not. I don't have anyone to talk to about beads, you see...at least, not in real life. And you may have gathered that I quite like beads :) Darling Husband can feign interest for a while, before his eyes start to slide back to his computer game. My family and friends are politely interested and my work collegues couldn't really give a monkeys. So the internet is my outlet, where I can 'talk' about beadsbeadsbeadsbeadsbeads to my heart's content!

I'm assuming that as you're reading this blog, you're interested in what I have to say - but then maybe you're just saying, "enough wittering on about beads, just show us the pics!".

So here's the eye candy :)

Listed in the usual place now!

The naming of beads is a difficult matter...

...it isn't just one of your holiday games! I'm misquoting T.S Eliot there, but you get the idea.

Do beads actually need names in order to sell? Probably not, but I've always named them, because somehow it seems more personal. I don't know, maybe you think that's nonsense and I'm wasting my time thinking up names, but hey, it makes me happy :) Not that it's always easy...sometimes a bead knows what it wants to be called straightaway; other times I have to trawl the internet to try and find a name that 'fits'.

I called this bead 'Singing Moon'. In case you were wondering, that is the Celtic name for September's full moon. I picked the name because it is September and well, I just loved the name!

This little beauty just had to be 'Spearmint'...

And as for this one...I had the name 'Autumn Rain' in my head as I was making it and I think it has grown into its name rather well!

What do you think? Do you like beads to have names or are you quite happy to see them listed as just 'Pink Set' or 'Blue focal no. 3'?

These beads are now listed on Ebay if you want to pop over and take a look!