Surfacing

Hello friends!

It's been awhile huh? I needed to drop off for the holidays. Holidays seem to ZOOM by at an alarming rate anymore. I wasn't feeling super jolly this year. I was really burned out and exhausted. I decided to finish up my sale for Black Friday/Cyber Monday and my Why Not Wing Ding sale and then drop off for awhile. I feel like I didn't get a break since before doing Bead Fest so I decided to finish up the sales and then spend some time SLOWING DOWN to enjoy the holidays before they slipped by. After all, I had MANY handmade gifts to create for friends and family. I unplugged, sat down to create, and would you believe NOTHING at all came out? It's like the creative energy was so depleted I just about gave up. Isn't that terrible? It was especially terrible for me since I am a gifter and feel great joy creating special things for people. I guess I felt a lot of pressure to create that super amazing gift for each individual. Why? I dunno. I just did and thinking of all of the handmade gifts I needed to make stressed me out to making NOTHING. Wow, what a bummer! But.... Thank God... things slowly started coming to me. Gift ideas popped into my head. I began creating gifts for people that weren't expecting anything. It was the perfect way to ease into making. Create with no expectations.  I was slowly getting inspired. I would see something that would spark an idea and off I ran with it.

Here are a few things I created....

Here were the gift tags I created for Besty, and Emily of Indigo Wild( our VERY favorite local soap company).  We attend their amazing friends and family party every year around the holidays. I normally gift them with some kind of piece related to their business(like their soap bars made out of glass), but this year I decided on something that was all Genea Beads ;)

Here were the gifts inside the boxes.

I even made a glass Zum bar for Tara(one of our favorite Zummy girls). 

I enjoyed creating the gift tags so well that I even recycled brown kraft bags we had and turned them into mixed-media gift wrap. I personalized a gift tag so that there was a very personal part the the gift wrap, but left the bag purely design so it could be re-used :)

Here was the gift I created for my friend Melissa. She loves butterflies and every year she has a word of the year. This year she chose "Inspire" so I added the text to the bottom. I was inspired to create this piece in my style from this simple Pinspiration.

I really LOVE this piece. I did it in my Moroccan style with some  mixed-media techniques.

I have way more pieces to show, but you can check them out on my page if you want to see all of them ;) 

I made my way back to the studio as well. These were the last beads for 2013!

Most all of these are sold already. They went FAST! I did lots of XL and large focals.

Here are the last 2 that are currently in the shop. I loved doing the "Desert Serpent" in an XL focal! It's such a huge canvas with which to work! The bead on the right was a serendipitous bead. I had this idea planned out for a different style focal and my propane was running out rapidly. I worked the bead as far as I could with the gas I had left with only about a lighter's worth of flame left before the torch went out completely! I am really pleased with the design. This is, of course another odd lot so the bead is very limited. Spiral Batik Urn "Wasabi".

It's been BONE Chilling cold here. In fact, right now it's 0 degrees. Brrrr! I will be headed over to the studio on the night of the 7th to make more beads. I have MANY things to make especially with all of my tutorial articles hitting the shelves for Bead Design Studio!   Lots to create in 2014! See you soon!

xo Genea