Growing Pains, OUCH!

Hello friends!

Ugh... I apologize for the lack of blogging and content lately. I am in the process of taking new photos for Etsy. I let the artist in me get a little crazy with some backgrounds and found out that they are actually detracting from my pieces. Want to have a look?

Taken on a metal fence in my backyard. On the back step with the black mat.

On the same metal fence with a limb that fell from the silver maple.

On the front porch wooden step.

On a white paper lantern. I LOVE this picture! I love the bright white with the gradient background that did it on it's own with the way the light hit it.
Taken on a metal plate. This picture was the suggested way to shoot future jewelry.

What do you think of the pictures? I talked with a few friends to get their opinions on the photos and what they thought about future pictures. A majority of the people I asked said they loved the artistic style pictures. What I realized about the people that I asked is that all of them are very visual, so the "pretty" pictures really caught their eye. What I realized about myself is that I see things with more of an artistic eye versus a business eye so the "pretty" pictures appeal to me as well. I had wondered if I should have a mixture of pictures to appeal to both types, but it sounds like a good rule to follow is to have 3 different ways of shooting photos so that the shop looks pulled together.

I am learning a lot about Etsy, photoshooting and just business stuff that I never really thought about. I am trying to soak it all in and be a good student. My brain is feeling SO full and when photos aren't turning out right I get so frustrated. I think my little Kodak Easyshare isn't really "cutting" it for the pictures I want it to take. I am trying to figure out how to make it work until I get more of a budget for a new camera. It sounds like Nikon is the way to go. It's funny thought because the "suggested" Nikon for great jewelry photography is $1400 and you still need the $500 fancy macro lens! Yikes!

Fe Fi Fo Fun treasury! Can you guess which one is mine? This lovely little treasury was put on by Whimsicals. Be sure to click on the link and check out her shop!
Here is a picture of my featured beads :)

Ok I hate to leave you with a short post, but my eyes are BURNING and I'm EXHAUSTED!

See you soon!

Much love,

Genea

Under Construction

Hello friends!

I bet you are wondering where I have been. Well although you have not seen me on Blogspot I have been busily making jewelry and changes in my Etsy shop! I have the great honor of working with Nicky of Morphologica on Etsy. I am doing an ENTIRE re-vamp on my shop. You will probably notice changes as I get some work done. I think the shop re-vamp and jewelry may be where I will be spending a bulk of my time these days for now. I just have SO much to do, I can hardly figure out where to start!

I just wanted to let you all know that I have been here doing my thing behind the scenes instead of here on my blog. I will most likely give updates as I make changes so you all can celebrate with me on my voyage. :)

Well I better get to work!

Have an awesome day!

Much love,

Genea

Early birthday present- a new body mod!

**WARNING: The below content may be more of an adult nature. Don't read ahead if tattoos and piercings offend you. **

On another note I am SUPER excited about my early b-day present from my friend Stephanie :D I got another pair or matching piercings that are not visible>:D Now I bet a bunch of you are cringing about the pain or horrified that I would "mutilate" my body in this manner. The truth is, is that my husband and I really enjoy expressing art on our bodies with piercings and tattoos. It is art on your body and since we have a deep appreciation of art and expression we enjoy adding these "modifications" to our forms. It is more of an accepted form of art on the body of people in our generation versus other generations where tattoos were just on bikers, convicts and military. I'm glad that there is a new openness in expression with our and newer generations.

Anyways, I'm sure there are a few of you that are interested in the look and experience of my new additions. I opted for tiny barbells that go diagonally across my nipples. I like the idea of the angled lines versus the straight lines. I feel that the angle compliments the shape of women's bodies. The piercing is just two tiny 4mm sized balls on either side of the nipple. They are barely noticeable with my clothing over the top. I didn't want hoops cause I thought they are kinda 80's(at least on me, this doesn't go for other people. I very much like the look of them on men) and I surely don't want to get snagged on anything! YOUCH!

So now for the pain update. If you are used to tattoos and piercings this one isn't too bad. The worst part of the piercing was the poke of the needle going through. Now this doesn't mean it still doesn't hurt, but that was the worst part. My piercer told me that the nipple skin is more tough and gristly in texture than skin or cartilage so he said you really need to push it harder through the surface. To me it felt like the needles glided right through. Now they do lube up the needles and they are VERY sharp if they just felt like they slid right through the surface.

The afterwards pain was a very strange sensation. It felt like the center of my nipple was like the feeling of getting goosebumps. Then I could feel pain radiate out from it that wrapped around the side of my breast and deeper into my chest. Very weird. My friend that has been breast feeding said that is kind of how your breasts feel when they are engorged with milk. Eek! I'm glad I still have a little while until I revisit that sensation.

Ibuprofen after my piercings made such a tremendous difference, that and the wearing of a sports bra to strap the girls down. I had to sleep on my back last night which is a total switch for me since I am an on the tummy sleeper. I had to turn my piercings last night, remove the "crusties" and put some all natural sea salt solution on them. I feel much better this morning already. They feel less sore and should be pretty well healed in about a week. They will be completely healed in 3-4 weeks. I sure will be excited to get back to sleeping on my stomach again :)

That is about all of the news I have to share for this week. I can't wait to go hang out with my friend Jd for his birthday tonight and go to the gay pride celebrations this weekend.

I hope you all have a fantastic weekend!

Much love,

Genea

More discs, rekkets and some of my new BE friends!

Hello friends!

Well I have been making a bunch of fun stuff so I have lots of pictures for you today :D

I am working on a special birthday present for a friend so I got into my Bullseye stash again looking for some super BRIGHT colors for her piece. I had so much fun just melting all kinds of colors I am sure I will have extras to list at a later time.I was able to make 3 at a time on each mandrel and decided to make these "wing dings" on 1/16th mandrels instead of my normal 3/32's.This view is a little prettier since you can see the colors better. I had a bead mat full of other stuff so I snagged up this piece of packing foam stuff to lay the beads on to see their color against white instead of my light wood colored desk top.
I met a new friend while trying to match a color glass bead with a rod. This new friend's name is "Sunset Coral". Now in this picture it looks pretty amber brown right? The wing ding kind of gives you a better idea of it's color when more light is passing through it. The glass is this amazing hue of orange/brown/pink. This color really intrigued me so I had to explore it a little more. I also met another color that you can see in the wing dings picture called "Vintage Rose". The rod color was this kind of pinkish brown, but when melted it strikes to: orangeish, pinkish and yellow.OMG, right?! Aren't they SOOOO pretty?! I found this other odd lot(I forget it's name at the moment) and used it for the stringer. The color is kind of ivoryish/transparent brown. The look of the stringer melted makes it looks kind of airy and soft. The Vintage Rose rod reminded me of my mother's peace rose that grew in our home in Wisconsin right under the rain gutter. It was a beautiful yellow/pinkish/peach and it grew like CRAZY from all the water it got being by the gutter. After thinking of her roses I just had to put these colors together into a few beads.

Now like all beautiful things I was sad to discover that I only have ONE rod of Vintage Rose and Light Sunset Coral. I checked out BE's website to see if I could find more of both colors and it looks like they are both odds. I did find a regular Sunset Coral so I am curious to see how close it is to the rod I have. Anyways, I will be trying to finish a set with these colors to offer sometime next week. With the small amount of glass I have, we will see just how far I can stretch it ;)

So now that I have tempted you with all of the things you CAN'T have, maybe I should show you all of the things you CAN have by sharing what is new in the shop ;)

NEW IN THE SHOP....

WOW, where do I begin! I am so excited about all of the new beads I made!
"Amanda's Wheel"- as you may know I have been SUPER stoked about making large holed discs lately. This bead is no exception! I took colors from my friend Amanda's shirt and made some beads to match. I just LOVE this color combination together! The colors are: chocolate brown, orange, teal, lime green and aqua. The teal is Messy's new color "Mermaid". It's a beautiful bluish teal and it was perfect for this color scheme :)"Amanda's Rekkets"- If you missed last weeks update, I listed some beads in my "rekkets" style. The "rekkets" is really "records" pronounced in an Eastern accent. It's kind of an old inside jokeish deal from a time in my past ;) Anyways, the same fun colors as the above focal, but smaller for tons of designing fun!"Gobstopper Wheel"- Holy freakin' YUM! These are my absolute FAVORITE colors together: lime green, aqua, coral and orchid! This bead looks like a Gobstopper jaw breaker cut in half with all the rings of color! This baby is a bit larger than some of the earlier discs with another 2 rings of color! By looking at the picture of it in my hand you can see just how much larger it is than it's friends :)"Gobstopper Rekkets"- What's awesome large also works for smaller things! I took my very favorite colors and made them into "rekkets" style discs. This set has 2 matching discs since I only had 4 colors instead of my normal 5 with which to work. This means that you can actually have a matching pair for earrings if you like or just opt to combine them all into a fun bracelet or necklace something something ;)"Jaw Breakers"- What a fantastical set! Lots of shapes and color along with the mix of transparents and opaques! I took my "gravity bubble" hollow design and put a spin on it by using opaque glass in the center instead of transparent for a different look. The larger discs are also a mix of transparent cored cane glass along with bands of opaques. To finish off the set, little spiral discs were added for some different size and texture. There are just SO many possibilities for this set! I can't wait to see what people make :D

SO WHAT ELSE IS NEW?...

Well I am the proud owner of http://www.geneabeads.com ! For now the site is just linked up to Etsy because when I was purchasing my domain I didn't get this web builder add-on from godaddy to build the page. It was pretty confusing. It turns out the page builder is $54, so I am thinking I might look around for another hosting service since thus far I am very unhappy with godaddy's services. The site is a mess with tons of tabs and banners and all of that stuff. I found it very difficult to navigate. I didn't feel that they were very clear with what exactly you needed to build a page without any html knowledge. Now on the upside their customer service rep was very nice, which made things pleasant.

I am looking into maybe moving things over to fat cow for a few reasons. My friend Brandon originally suggested I get a page here. It looks like they had all of the things I needed to build the page, along with 3 domain's and easy web building tools. The only reason I went for godaddy's domain was because it was $10.48 that day for the domain. It turns out that price was for the name only, so that is why the page is currently forwarded until I sort the rest of the things out. Another thing that is selling me on fat cow is that they are run on wind energy, which really appeals to the green girl inside of me :D So I will keep you all posted to the sites updates as soon as I get them all worked out.

"Magic" color reactions and layering

Hello friends!

So I am pretty excited about this latest run of beads. I did some more designs in the "magic" color reaction colors so this is a nice addition to the beads I made last week. Getting a torch upgrade has been such an amazing thing! I can't believe the difference of all of the things I can do with all of that extra heat! It is so enjoyable to work! I wonder how I ever got by working on a hot head for almost 5 years!

So I thought I would go into some of my discoveries while making beads before heading over to the shop.So here is the first thing I discovered. Both of these beads are the same. So you want to know how right? Ok here is the deal.... The bead on the left is the bead on the right melted down into a round bead! Pretty cool huh? Same stuff, but a different look. As you also might notice I got some nice color reactions when the glass melted down causing that cool ring of orange. Now here is the thing. Only some of the colors react with each other and the others don't. That is why some of the round beads in the set have a few very crisp lines and others have more organic lines. The most reactive girls out of the bunch are 2 of my favorites: EDP and Rubino Oro.

The discs melted down make pretty plump round beads. They end up being 12-15mm which is pretty big for my normal size. :D Now the thing with making these rounds is that you need to balance the heat from top to bottom and side to side to make sure that all of the striped don't get swallowed up. The reactivity of some of the colors also "swallows" some of the color as well, so this might be something you want to keep in mind when making these style beads.

Here is my other experiment. The disc on the right was made with twisted cane and rounds of a solid color. The way these two beads are different was the application of glass. So on the right was a wind of cane, then a wind of solid color then melted into a solid disc.

The bead on the right was made by winding a disc of all solid colors and then applying cane on top of the melted in winds instead of inbetween them. As you can see by the results the different applications make for more of an organic style or more of a crisp design style. Pretty sweet eh?!

Now let's head over to the shop.

NEW IN THE SHOP...
The following beads have colors of: orchid, mint green, golden yellow, turquoise, and ruby pink.
"Gobstopper Batiks"- I named these beads because the rings remind me of gobstopper candy and the reactivity of the colors remind me of beautiful batiked fabric :D As I said above these pretty round plumpers were made by winding different reactive glass into discs and then melting them down. I just LOVE how you can see all of the neat color reactions from the glass reacting. A design with the beads facing hole side out would be a nice way to get the full effect of the beads.

"Stone Rekkets"- Another silly name,but they remind me of stone with their solid somewhat muted colors and "rekkets" because they look like vinyl records. I used the term "rekkets" for fun because with an Eastern accent "records" becomes "rekkets" lol. The winds of color stay separated in disc form, but look at all of the pretty colors! A design stringing them hole side out would be a nice way to show off the beads :)
"Concentric"- Rings of concentric circles make up this large holed disc. The hole is a whopping 12mm which will make it lots of fun for designing! The large hole actually fits my pinky finger. It makes me think of eating those little chocolate striped cookies but putting them on your finger and eating around them. You did that when you were a kid too, right? :) I think this focal with the "stone rekkets" set would make an amazing necklace.
"Helix Wheel"- I really like the way this one turned out! As I said above the different layering effects give it a different look. The twisted bands almost make it look like it's turning. This bead has a 4mm hole which gives it more design possibility. Again hanging it sideways with hold side facing out will give it the best look. This would be awesome combined with the "gobstopper batiks" set.
"Snakes Skin Vertebrae"- This focal got it's name from the look you get from the style of winding the glass above. Here you can really see that "snake's skin" look. I swear if you didn't know this was glass you would think it was stone. The bead is very thick and solid giving it a nice weight. This bead has a 5mm hole and would work great with a design where it was strung hole side out.

WHAT ELSE IS NEW?...

I am excited to announce that Genea Beads has been featured in the "Pastels" treasury posted by Mosiac Gems!

Well I just received my package that has some new glass inside along with something for the project on which I am working. I am excited to see how this will all work out. I will probably make some test lentils to check out the new colors I received. :D That is the tester side of me coming out lol.

Here is a picture Jan sent me of her gorgeous necklace she made with the "Vino Noir" set I listed the other week.
Isn't it just perfect with the Garnets she chose?! Wow!

Ok so this is totally random, but when I went to make dinner for Ricky and me I pulled the chicken out of the ziplock bag and thought it was cute that it had frozen into a heart! Silly, I know, but whatever keeps me entertained right?! :D

I think that's all I have to report for this week, but I will see you soon.

I hope you are enjoying springs warmer weather!

Much love,

Genea

I've got my mojo back

Hello friends!

I know, it's late. I was really excited about what I made today and I will have some interesting things to share with you about how they were created.

Sweetest dreams and Good night,

Genea

Zebra of a different color

Hello friends!

Are you excited I have an update for you? It's a day later than I normally like to list, but at least I have things to offer this week, right? :D

I don't LOVE all of the things I have for you today! Which is your favorite?

NEW IN THE SHOP....

Where to start? They are all awesome! "L'amor Flutterby"- It's been quite some time since I have made a large butterfly focal. I only made a limited run of 3 the first time I created them. This little one is a bit different too! I tweaked the design so it is a bit smaller than the originals with a different "twist". Heh. twist... twist in the design... Yeah, ok. *ahem* Anyways, there is a twist in the design by the wings and a small raked heart on the belly. The wings are a pale lavender pink with ruby spots.Here are a few more views.
"Desert Serpent" - This set of 7 lentils is made on a base of dark ivory with twisted serpent canes, and rainbow raku . The chemical reactions produce an amazing dark blackish brown curdled veining that is just INCREDIBLE! These are a PERFECT match to my Ancient Tablet "Serpent Corazon" focal I listed the other week. I loved the focal so much I thought it HAD to have some matching beads!"Desert Serpent" pair- Ok so I got a bit carried away making these beads and had enough to offer a pair as well. They are dark ivory, with serpent twisted cane, rainbow raku and AWESOME :D They would make super SWEET earrings, no?

"Zebra Batiks"- Don't you just LOVE the "magic" colors?! Me too! This time around I even made cane for extra appeal! Pretty sweet huh?! The twisted cane made me think of zebra stripes and the "magic" colors always remind me of batiked fabric which is my absolute FAVORITE :D Colors include: ruby pink, pale yellow, mint green and turquoise.
"Zebra Kaleidascope"- So yeah, pretty sure this focal is f*ing awesome! The twisted canes and "magic" colors really do remind me of looking through a kaleidascope and seeing all of the ornate patterns. Both sides are different so there is something interesting to see from every angle. Colors include: ruby pink, pale yellow, mint green and turquoise. Did I mention it would be KILLER with the above set?"Zig-Zag Zebra"- Ok so it may be a mini, but this is a very special bead. It is part of the project on which I am working. I can't really give more details at the moment, but it may quite possibly be very famous. Moving on... Twisted canes make up the design on this little trio. If you had not noticed the rounds are actually different. One has mint green and orchid and the other has turquoise and orchid. Bet you wouldn't have ever known huh? ;) Anyways, they are both awesome and tie in with the twisted lentil. This little set would make a cute pendant and earrings or be a great addition to the above beads!

WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

Well it certainly has been GLOOMY here in the midwest! The constant rain and cloudiness are kind of taking a toll on me. I know you are shocked because I am ALL about rain, but I could use a few rays for some sun therapy. Taking pictures has been an absolute NIGHTMARE. The lack of sun requires many more lights for illumination. I am planning on getting some more lights, bulbs and making a light bounce thingy. There is a cheap design for one on the Frantz Art Glass blog by Pat Frantz. I can't find the link to the page, but if you are resourceful you can google it ;)

I think that's really about all. Sorry I don't have more exciting news for you.

See you soon!

Much love,

Genea