Between 2009 and 2011 I wrote a few lampwork glass beadmaking tutorials. I sold some of these as PDFs on my website but I stopped doing so years ago. Not a week goes by where I don't receive an email from someone asking if they can buy one of my tutorials so I've decided to put them for sale on Etsy. The tutorials are for my ‘Cupcake’ beads, my ‘Roly Poly’ lentils and my ‘Flurry’ implosion beads. The latter are what have now morphed into my ‘Anemone’ beads but the technique is the same. The PDF tutorials are the original files from 2009 to 2011. They are still perfectly readable and the pictu ..read more

I've always said that you never stop learning a craft. There's always new knowledge to be had, skills to be honed and new materials and techniques to try. Whenever I make a bead design that I've not done for a while I enjoy applying my current knowledge of glass to it. Oftentimes this knowledge is minor but it's knowledge that the me of three years ago didn't possess and it allows me to understand the bead better. I am aware that I'm probably sounding really wanky but I'll carry on anyway. With these Ditsybeads there are several things required to get the effect I'm after. The most important ..read more

I'm not a huge fan of Etsy. Its fees are too high and I have issues with some of their policies and biases. However, I'm at a point where I'm selling very little and I need to get my work seen. Instagram algorithms don't help with this unless you're willing to become a videographer who spends seventeen hours a day creating Instagram content and I refuse to do that. Also, PayPal seems to be playing silly buggers with my website checkout for some of my customers, and Etsy has many alternative payment options, so I've reluctantly reopened my Etsy shop. However, I'm keeping it to just UK sales at ..read more

I've fallen off the blog again, haven't I? I mean, between my previous post and this one we've had Christmas and are into the third month of a new year, so that's quite a large blog pause. I had a sad start to the year with the death of my maternal grandmother. Nannie was my last remaining grandparent so her death feels like a generational chapter closing. Nannie and Mum (holding a very tiny me) It sort of feels like the year hasn't really got going yet. I've been crocheting doily after doily. The doily stack has reached insane levels of ridiculous but round and round I go, addin ..read more

My glass grump is ongoing. This one is lasting a long time and if I'm honest, this is the closest I've come to giving up lampwork in the eighteen-odd years I've been doing it. However, I'm a stubborn cow and I actually do love melting glass so I'm determined to hang on. What's making me feel this way? I don't quite know. I mean, I sort of know, but it's hard to admit to myself. Maybe people don't want my work like they used to? There, I admitted it.  I don't know the exact reason/s for this. Perhaps people simply no longer like my work? Or me? Oddly, I can deal with the latter better than ..read more

I've been headpinning. At this point I'm in that zone I often find myself in where I keep making the same thing to find out why sometimes the outcome is this and other times that. This is resulting in an enormous amount of headpins. The daft thing is, I don't even know if people want to buy headpins. Are some of you thinking "What is a headpin anyway?" and wondering what I'm droning on about? Headpins are not hat pins or hair pins, neither are they finished items of jewellery. Headpins are used by jewellery makers to create pendants, earrings or charms. Beads are threaded onto the wire of a ..read more

Up until Thursday I'd not made an oak leaf headpin for five years. I approached the task slightly nervously because I was pretty convinced I'd forgotten how to make one but within two attempts my brain and hands had remembered exactly what to do. It was almost like I was watching someone else dab on the glass here, swipe it there, shaping and coaxing everything into an oak leaf kind of shape. Then I was off and away, muscle memory well and truly jogged. I make my headpins in different ways, depending on what wire I want to use for them. The acorns I make on the end of a mandrel. This is ..read more

Yesterday afternoon while I was tidying away my jewellery making stuff  I found a bag of tiny anodised aluminium jump rings. At just over 4mm diameter they're smaller than the rings I used for the shaggy loops earrings in my previous post and I wondered if the smaller rings would work for the same weave. A few hours later I'd made this bracelet. It's unbelievably light and it has a wonderful fluidity and texture to it. Chris said it's "like metal bubble bath foam" and that's a really good description. It's frothy. I've put it in the chain maille section of my shop. The three ..read more

After my trip to the cemetery on Saturday I walked into the city centre, popped into a record shop, paid a visit to Fitzbillies for a couple of their famous and ridiculously delicious Chelsea buns, then caught the bus back home. At some point in that very small window of being out and surrounded by other people, I caught some kind of lurg. Four lateral flow tests say it's not Covid but I'm constantly coughing, sneezing and my energy levels are very low. Pre-Covid era I'd not had a cold for years so maybe it's just a bog standard one of those and I've forgotten what they feel like? Whatever, I ..read more

I went for a wander round an old cemetery at the weekend. The cemetery is a Victorian one which is closed to new burials - the most recent grave I saw there was dated 1997 - but it's a lovely, peaceful place to be, full of magnificent trees, birds and squirrels. I sat for a while on a bench under a beautiful holly tree, watching the squirrels gathering acorns from underneath the massive oak tree on the other side of the path. It's been quite a while since I last made acorns. I've always made them as necklaces with the addition of a glass oak leaf but I wanted to make some earrings and th ..read more