New Blooming Daisy Ring!

So remember those cute new flowers... Yeah, I made one into a ring. This was that idea I had in my head when I was driving home.... It was pretty sweet cause it was another one of those ideas where I had the finished project in mind before making the beads :D Generally this happens backwards where I just make beads and then come up with a design later.

Here is my new Blooming Daisy Ring design! What do you think? I LOVE it :D
Well I am off to do some other things...

Much love,

Genea

New Items on Etsy!

Hey Everyone,

I just loaded some new items into my Etsy shop and they are BEADS! I got some Valentine's Day stuff added to the shop and when I take some more photos I will have more lampwork beads! Stay tuned for more!

Much love,

Genea

The wait is OVER....

So after getting a meal and a shower I managed to have enough energy to take a few pictures. I will admit that my latest flower beads really got me over to the camera to take some pictures! Are you ready? This is what being inspired looks like....
OMG! Aren't these SO pretty?! I had the idea for them in the car on my way home from visiting Melissa at Bead Boutique :D I love it when they turn out prettier in person than they do in your head :D $TBA
I couldn't resist making a huge flower to match those pretty Keylime and Aqua ones that Billie bought. I still can't get them as pretty as Rebecca Friends flowers. I guess we will leave those to the experts ;) NFS
Daisy Vine Earrings(name pending. Maybe I can come up with a cooler name. Any ideas??). $35 ea,
Loopy Dings earrings made from my Wing Ding beads :D I really LOVE these and they are WAY fun to make :D $35ea.
Crazy 8's(remember that card game?). I named them "Crazy 8's" because the spacers form "8's" and they are pretty wild! I actually was inspired to make these after I made my Trapeze earrings. $25ea.
Trapeze earrings! I made them out of super sweet BE oddlot glass from the Freaky, Streaky, Striker pack sold at the ISGB Gathering when it was here in Kansas City. I LOVE the glass in this kit. I am so happy my mom bought it for me! I actually sat on the glass for almost 2 years until I got my minor hooked up! $18ea.
And last, but not least my Candy Droplet earrings. $18ea. These are modeled from Melissa's original design that she made from some of Stephanie Sersich's beads. Melissa's earrings were my favorites so I had to try some :D

Well I hope you enjoyed my little burst of creativity!


Much love,

Genea

P.S. Some of these are added or will be added to my Etsy and Art Fire shop >:D

Just a bit longer

OMG am I pooped! I made some beads this morning and I spent most of the afternoon making invoices and shooting photo invoices. I am trying to be more organized than I already am this year. I am asking my stores to list the names of the items that I sell so that I know what to make more of.

I have 3 regular stores and 2 online stores with which to keep up! I am adding another retail store locally too! I have SO much to do!

You can see a few new items in my Art Fire shop. I will post some pics when I get a chance. I am still working on getting all of these beads wrapped up to ship out to stores. After I am done with that I am RELAXING.

I hope you all are having a wonderful day.

Much love,

Genea

Ugh... not enough time for everything...

Did I promise more pictures? If I did then I will post them as soon as I take them. I am usually pretty good at that stuff. I guess I should get an unlimited Flickr account so I can stay current instead of hogging up my blog. I guess there just isn't enough money to go around these days is there?

So I was busily making beads to make into my new earring designs. You know those pretty Keylime and Auqa filigranas in the other picture? Yep, they are gone! Billie is now the proud owner of them. A woman after my own heart since she picked lime green and aqua! The earrings looked so cute on her. I was thinking a super huge flower would make a nice pendant with some of that amazing fairy silk. One of these days I will have ALL of the bundles they offer and if they don't all sell I will just enjoy looking at them hung on my wall :D

It was really exciting having an idea for something and then making the beads for it. I even made beads a day and then designed the next so I could make them as soon as they were out of the kiln. It was VERY exciting. Did I mention that I used ALL of my earwires? Ugh... bummer, but I have pretty new earrings to photograph and add to my shops :D

I got a few things added to my Art Fire page, but not enough. I will have to add more items. I have to update that and take some pictures so I can add more stuff.

I have an interview with Kristen Maun tomorrow at 4pm :) I am excited to show her around. I still have my table of all of my lampwork beads still up in my studio. It will be nice to have them all for her to oogle when she is here.

Tomorrow should be a busy day. I need to get some beads made before Kristin comes, get the house tidyed up, shower, photograph stuff and load it into my store. We will see how far I get ;)

Well I suppose I should go. I have some pretty crystal snowflake earrings to add hooks to that Billie gave me. She also gave me some items to finish some earrings, a lovely seed bead weaving book and some cook books! What a sweet girl! :*

Well I am off to bed.

Much love,

Genea

I SO wish I was going to this class!

Stephanie Sersich Inc. January 23rd, 2009

Hello Midwest! I have just booked my ticket to Chicago! As usual, this time of year, I'm teaching at The Gathering Place (a.k.a. Portia's), in Naperville. If you have never been there, ask anyone - it's the best place to take a beadmaking class in the Midwest. For me, it's my other home. Being at Portia's is like a warm hug. The class is three days, February 13th-15th. It combines glass beadmaking and jewelry-assembly.

Take your beadmaking and jewelry to the next level! MORE Beads & Jewelry for Girly Girls This class is for the intermediate to advanced beadmaker who feels it's time to make more unique jewelry and brighten up their color palette. The first Beads and Jewelry for Girly Girls workshop is not a prerequisite for this class. We'll make lampwork beads, buttons, cabachons and pendants for the first part of the workshop and assemble them into unique jewelry before the end of class. The bead-making portion will focus on non-traditional forms - silly shapes that hang off the mandrel, sculptural forms like birds, and off-mandrel cabachons for a variety of settings. We will make the little beads into earrings, both wire-worked and strung with Softflex. The cabs will be made into rings with beaded bands and brooches that incorporate fibers. We'll form multi-component pendants with stacked beads and silver wire. We'll ponder the possibilities and push the limits of glass and beads.

Hope you'll join us. Contact Portia to sign up - www.thegatheringplacestudio.com or 630.201.7970 Peace, love and beads, Steph Stephanie Sersich Inc. stephanie@sssbeads.com

New Designs!

OMG so I am SO excited about some of my new designs. For some reason I was particularly inspired on Sunday. It took me until Monday to start making beads. After they were made I had more ideas and made more beads. So the beads from the first inspiration were done and sitting on my bead mat while the others were sizzling up in the kiln. So today I FINALLY caved and made the jewelry I had in my brain. It's pretty unusual for me to have a design in mind when making beads it seems like it's always the opposite. Anywho.. my doodles came to life and I must say I am pretty proud that they turned even better than I had hoped!

Are you ready to see them?

Are you sure?....

Are you REALLY sure?....

Ok.. I am done teasing...

TA DA!!!!
Here are my flowery earrings. The flowers on the left are hot pink with orange swirly centers and the other flowers are turquoise swirly centers with Keylime. YUM!
My new favorite color combination. These beads are so lustrous they just radiate color. Do you like my new photography surface? It just happened to skip my mind that I have this awesome modern table with a white shiny top!

Here they are all together. The top left ones are Turquoise with Lime over the top and Coral dots, the ones on the left are pink and purple and the ones on the bottom are lavender encased with pale aqua with yellow dots. It's kinda hard to see that light blue encasing.

Pretty sweet huh? I was SUPER excited :D:D:D

Ok pretty sure I should go to bed now. I have to get up and make some more pretties :D

Sweet Dreams!

OMGorgeous!

I SO LOVE the beads I just made! Don't you?

Art Fire and Bead & Button News

Ok well I did it. I started an Art Fire page as well to see if it will get better business than my Etsy shop. Here is the addy for Genea Beads Art Fire page. I will be adding things over the next few days.

I also made contact with Linda Kolatz from Bead & Button as well. It looks like she will need some more time to see if some tables free up. She asked me to call back at the end of January. So I will keep you all posted when I find out what transpires.

I have some new AWESOME beads to clean and string. I am also working on some new jewelry designs. Stay tuned!

Much love,

Genea

Photos and stuff

Ugh finally.. Don't you HATE it when machinery won't work right for you? What am I talking about?... well cameras in particular. I hate it when they don't "see" things they way our eyes do. I spent a long while trying to photograph this amazing bead I made. The picture still does it NO justice, but you can see a little bit of the iridescent sheen that appears on the bead in the lightbulb light spot. I was making some Valentine's day beads and decided to venture off into other colors besides pink and red. I wanted to use some of R4's Sasha's Silver and remembered something from a thread on LE about how certain silver glasses fumed the surface of a bead just by adding a design. I saw a Dirty Martini bead in particular that piqued my interest so I decided to try this out for myself. I wish I could find the exact photo from the thread, but I dug through the whole "Lets see your glass made with CiM glass" and couldn't find it. Anyways, the bead is made with a base of Dirty Martini and then I used Sasha's silver for the stringer. When I reduced the stringer the silver glass fumed the surface making it this rich golden color. When you hold the bead in the light you can see iridescent "oil slicks" all over the surface of the bead. It looks like the way bubbles do when you see them in the light! I just wish I could capture how beautiful the bead is as a digital image!

So I bet you are tired of reading and want to see this bead huh? ;) I knew you would...

Here is the image I sent to Kathy at Creation is Messy. See that little "oil slick" I was talking about where you see the light bulb reflection? Pretty amazing huh? This photograph will be added to the Dirty Martini gallery and will be in the newest Creation is Messy newsletter that is scheduled to go out today.

Here is another pic of it in my hands. Can you believe how yellow the glass got?

Here is a picture of the paddle I swiped from the CiM site. Isn't amazing how different the glass is? You would have never guessed. I think if I didn't know what I used I would have guessed Ivory or Opal Yellow. How 'bout you?

So I made a few more new Valentine's Day things and some other hearts. I also made some KICK ASS eye beads as well. I spent the better part of the morning trying to get all of the images on my computer and edited. I will upload a few of them for your viewing pleasure ;)

Here is a winged heart made with CiM Sangre. If you have not already checked out this glass I would highly recommend it. The photo doesn't show the red as bright as it really appears in person. It's a lovely red and that is coming from someone that loathed red. Loathed red? Yep... Why? I look like shit in red since I have red hair >:D lol. I am finding a special place in my heart for red now a days so I'm getting there.
Another heart in Sangre with a keyhole in the front of it and a key. I didnt know if people would get it so I thought if I included a key it would make sense. It is entitled "He who holds the key..." I am assuming that you all know how the rest goes, but if you don't it goes "He who holds the key can unlock my heart". This was from a sterling silver necklace that had a heart with a picece missing where a key would fit. It came with two neckalces. One with the heart and one with the key.
A heart with an eye. Imagine that ;) I was a little disappointed with how the purple turned out though. The purple is a Kugler color and the rod looks like this more purply Dark Periwinkle. When it came out of the kiln it was this dark gray purple. Doesn't anyone understand that we all like BRIGHT, PURPLE purples?! CiM has made one that I love called Grape Ape. It actually stays purple with no metallic sheen! Very exciting.
I thought this would be cute. I love daisies. They are such happy flowers. I used some nice lime green polka dots to set off the red. This heart makes me happy and cheerful inside :)

Here are those eye beads I was telling you about! the one on the left was a remake of an older eye bead I made that is featured in the newest The Flow Winter 2008 issue. The difference between the old and new one is that I stacked and raked layers of green under the pink iris than I did on the original. If you wondered who has the original it's ME of course! it was too pretty to let go :D I used it as the pendant to a necklace and hanging below it is a heart with wings bead from Green Girl Studios. I LOVE their stuff! It's very whimsical :D I have several of their pieces. Anways, back to the beads. I Absolutely LOVE the pink one as well. The base is CiM Cranberry pink. Cranberry pink actually very closely resembles a BE odd lot. I forget the name of the color, but it is really pretty. The super awesome thing about Cranberry Pink is that you can use it with Orange and Coral glass. For more info on that subject you can visit the Clockwork page at CiM's site.

Here is one of my favorite ideas I came up with. This is a bottle of love potion called "Infatuation". I love to make these each year for Valentine's day. The new addition to this bead was using CiM's Blush pink to be the color of the potion instead of just a clear bottle.
I really LOVE skulls too so I made the Emo Valentine heart focal and the lentil skull set this year that has a little cracked broken heart as the center bead. Those beads are new designs this year and the other bottom set is an older design from fall. I like the more sculptural skulls better than the lentil ones ,but the lentil ones worked best for the set.
Isn't this the saddest thing ever? It's a red broken heart! I know there are V-day haters out there and this is for them ;) You know V-day kinda sucks if you don't have a sweetheart!
Here is my Red version of my Emo Valentine heart. This bead was made second so I thought maybe some cute polka dots would dress it up a bit.
My "Passionate Heart" heart. This one turned out so awesome. I love the flames on it! The flames are made with CiM Clockwork Orange and V Pineapple Sparkle odd. I have had this latest obsession with making beads with fire. Imagine that being a bead maker!

Well I suppose I should go shower and get dressed... Have a wonderful day!

Much love,

Genea

Anti-Valentine's Day and Valentine's Day Beads

Ok so as promised(but late >;P) here are my Anti-Valentine's Day beads and Valentine's Day beads. I also posted these on Lampwork Etc. , but if you don't have a login you can't view it anyways.

Sorry ahead of time for the color of the pic. For some reason it was really yellow so I had to color correct it and I had to cram them all on one page to photograph them together.

*ahem* ANYWAYS... Here they are ;)

Anti-Valentine's Day Beads
Skull and crossbones on a heart, hearts with lines through them, broken hearts, and emo skulls :D

Here are the Valentine's Day ones...
Chocolate Truffles, Kisses, lovey bears w/ hearts for their noses, hearts, love potion and flowers.
How is that for mixing it up? Hehehehehe

I hope it was worth the wait ;)

Much love,

Genea

Beads,beads and more beads!

Yes, I know I have been gone again and I didn't post those pictures I promised yet. Where have I been exactly? Well I have been receiving all of my stock from my stores and photographing it. This is the time of year when I swap things out, keep things to make jewelry and add new things to stores inventory, but first...... Yep, some of my special customers get to come shop! I also have a few new stores that are interested in my wares! How exciting! I am always happy to share my works of art with new places and people. Maybe my beads will eventually make it out to your neck of the woods! Anyways, what fun is an entry without some pictures?!

Here is a side view of my table with all of my beads on it!

Here is a shot of the table if you are standing in front of it.

I think I will wait until tomorrow to photograph all of the new Valentine's Day beads since I have more in the kiln. I even did something totally different... Anti-Valentine's Day beads! So for all of you lovey day haters out there I have some funzies for you! Where did I get this wonderful idea? Well a friend had this Anti-Valentine's Day teddybear! It was a bear with a heart that was crossed out on it's stomach! How funny is that?! I thought the beads might be fun.

I think I am digging this new schedule I have for myself. Instead of waiting until I get back from the gym to make beads I am making them before I go and setting my kiln so it will turn off when I have to leave! Ingenious right?! I am more fresh at the beginning of the day anyways so this really helps me when I have to create. My hubby has been putting me through such intense work outs that I am way too pooped to do ANYTHING by the time I get home! By setting my kiln earlier I can also feel free to go out at night! Since the kiln will be off when I leave I don't have to worry about babysitting the kiln all night and staying home! Woo hoo! Sooooo anyone want to do something tonight??

Talk with you later!

Much love,

Genea

Did you see it?

I was very excited to receive my copy of The Flow Winter 2008 issue today! I was accepted to be one of the artists in this issue featuring women in glass :D I am on page 11 #45 :D You might have noticed it is the same eye bead I use as my pic in Etsy ;) This was one of my favorite eye beads that I made when I didn't want to work on an order ;) He he.

Well I just thought I would pop on and share that. I really need to get my butt downstairs to make some beads before going out tonight so I will catch ya later!

Much love,

Genea

Hello again...

Wow.. it's been awhile huh? Did you all survive Christmas and New Year's? I did. We had a wonderful trip in Colorado with Ricky's family :D We stopped by a few people's houses on New Year's, but I was so pooped from lack of sleep and a killer pressure headache I went home early. I got back to the house just as New Year's struck midnight. I heard fireworks going off all over the neighborhood. Maybe I won't be such a party pooper next year ;)

I have finally got settled in and started making new beads. I was so pooped out from doing Halloween and Christmas beads that I just couldn't get myself started on Valentine's day beads... well it turns out that people really want them, so after my vacation I decided to start some. Infact there are some in my kiln right now. I got my butt in gear this morning and got my beads made before I go to the gym. This is pretty sweet since I have been completely exhausted after going to the gym and missed out on beads the last two days. Since the kiln will be done running it's cycle before I leave for the gym I can come home and either leave the house or just chill. Sa-weet!

I have a ton of pics to add to my blog, but I am too lazy to upload them and add text at the moment. I will probably take some pics of my new Valentine's beads tomorrow and blog about those.

Well I guess I will get going. I just wanted to write something to let you all know I am still alive ;)

TTFN- Ta, ta for now!

Much love,

Genea

Hello again...

Wow.. it's been awhile huh? Did you all survive Christmas and New Year's? I did. We had a wonderful trip in Colorado with Ricky's family :D We stopped by a few people's houses on New Year's, but I was so pooped from lack of sleep and a killer pressure headache I went home early. I got back to the house just as New Year's struck midnight. I heard fireworks going off all over the neighborhood. Maybe I won't be such a party pooper next year ;)

I have finally got settled in and started making new beads. I was so pooped out from doing Halloween and Christmas beads that I just couldn't get myself started on Valentine's day beads... well it turns out that people really want them, so after my vacation I decided to start some. Infact there are some in my kiln right now. I got my butt in gear this morning and got my beads made before I go to the gym. This is pretty sweet since I have been completely exhausted after going to the gym and missed out on beads the last two days. Since the kiln will be done running it's cycle before I leave for the gym I can come home and either leave the house or just chill. Sa-weet!

I have a ton of pics to add to my blog, but I am too lazy to upload them and add text at the moment. I will probably take some pics of my new Valentine's beads tomorrow and blog about those.

Well I guess I will get going. I just wanted to write something to let you all know I am still alive ;)

TTFN- Ta, ta for now!

Much love,

Genea