Glass doodles

Hello friends!

Do you doodle? I do. Sometimes on paper. I used to doodle lots in school on the edges of paper as my mind wandered in class. I would doodle on the envelopes of bills while I sat on hold waiting to pay them. 

The other day I "doodled in glass". Yes, you can actually do that. Well... sort of. So what is glass doodling? It's when you just create things. You just sit down and make what comes out. This is kind of hard for a production based person like myself, but very important to the creative process for sure.  Generally one glass doodle will spring board another idea and all the sudden you are frantically trying to create this amazing idea that popped into your head. Sometimes it comes out AMAZING and even better than you envisioned it. Other times its absolute crap. 

Want to see my doodles? Lol, well doesn't that sound like a proposition? LOL... Anyways...

Pretty nutty huh? I had dichroic glass, silver glass, silvered ivory and kryptonite on my bead table.  The sunish looking bead kinda ended up with these funky little tendril looking deals. It was supposed to be more sunrayish, but it sure is pretty. 

The hollow bead actually has a dichroic cylinder that goes through the middle. Isn't it pretty? HA! You can't see it! Bummer! I thought the opaly glass would be a little more translucent than it was. It also has these really cool silver glass dots with clear on them. When you turn the bead you can see these sort of labradorite looking "firey" dots. It's a translucenty shimmery blue.

The last one is one of my OLD bead styles called a "Delicous Pod". I called them that because they were so pretty I wanted to eat them. It's a sort of implosionish bead. You can't really tell from the photo since all of the silver glass and clear are very reflective. The outside dots have that really pretty "fire" in them, but the inside ones went hazy brown and kind of disappeared.

So what did "turn out"?  This baby below!

 

Isn't she AMAZING?! I am totally in LOVE with oriental poppies. This ring was inspired by the poppies I see on my walk to the bus everyday. I just love their little stripey centers, their fuzzies around the stamen and their ruffly petals. Their pods even look really sweet too!

 

I wish I would have taken a picture of their whole yard in bloom! These particular poppies were growing in the gravel in front of their house. 

They have this little stone wall with a white fence on it and have raised garden beds with poppies and all of these other pretty flowers.

I actually ran inside during my session to look up a picture of them to get a better idea in my mind.  Here is the photo I used for the ring above.

 

So this one shows some lighter pink and darker pink around the outside. I kinda used my coraly pink instead. 104 glass doesn't really have a dark pink opaque this color, but it would be amazing(hint hint).

 

Here is the other photo I took with my phone. I ended up using this center with the opaque ring you saw first, but made a new stamen for the transparent one. Now to create another ring!

I hope you enjoyed looking into my brain's scattered mess while designing.

Have a wonderful day!

xo Genea

Winter Enchantment- Art Beads blog - Genea Beads

Hello friends!

Well I don't know if you are getting spring where you are, but it sure still feels like winter here in Kansas City, Missouri!

It's been nice that it's been cold since it took me until now to get my Art Beads blog completed. I was swamped with the Bead Soup Party and I am definitely not a "multi-tasker". I always HATE that corporate term. Multi-tasking just means doing a million things at once crappy instead of one thing at a time well done. So now that my soup design was complete it was time to work on my Winter Enchantment blog WELL :D  

Mom ended up coming over to bead with me :) Since she already had her beads picked out for her fringe bracelet it was easier for her to travel here. One never knows what one will need for a mixed-media asymmetrical bracelet, you know!

Here was mom's bead mat with all of her fringe beads layed out. See all of the Genea Beads :)

Here is a pic of mom beading :) I really love beading with my momma. I hope you get to enjoy creating jewelry with someone you love. It is really nice to create with another person!

 Yikes! Is this what your bead table looks like when you are creating? Every time I think of how messy my desk gets when I create, I ALWAYS think of Creation is Messy(they make awesome glass rods). I always think it's just the perfect name because, well creation IS messy!

Here was the first design. I liked it, but the hollow on the right was uncomfortable. It just didn't sit right. I was bummed because I really wanted to use the Hill Tribe silver simple flower bead caps. The caps were actually a bit more rounded, but they stuck out on the sides of my hollow bead. I thought "Hmmm... I wonder if I just put them on my bench block and give them a few taps to make them a little flatter..." Guess what? It worked! See how they fit nice a snug on the bead? Cool little trick you can use if you ever run into that problem. If it's not working out, hit it with a HAMMER! Lol, if only that trick worked for everything :/ Oh well ;)

 

Ah there we go! I took out the hollow bead and stuck in a lovely Hill Tribe lentil that was an orphan in my bead box. Lentils are always such comfortable beads to wear and it fit in just fantastically!  Now for the supplies I ordered. I got: 2mm seamless sterling silver rounds, 2x2 silver crimp tubes,  Hill Tribe silver flower stamped round bead frame, and silver plated round links on round cable chain.

Don't you just LOVE the pieces I got from Art Beads?!  I LOVE the round stamped Hill Tribe bead frame! Of course you knew I would like it because it provides "negative space" which I find terribly visually appealing, oh and it's HILL TRIBE! ;) I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the loopy cable chain! When I saw that Art Beads was carrying it I immediately remembered seeing Lorelei use this very same chain in some of her pieces. I remembered loving not only her jewelry, but oh that chain! It really has a wonderful "soft" feel to it. The loops have this amazing movement to them that is just really incredible :)

Do you like what I did with the square bead frame? I wanted to use it in a different way so I used jump rings to hold the sides and strung a headpin through the bead holes to hold the inside lampwork bead and drop a Hill Tribe dangle from the bottom :D I love doing clever unexpected things with jewelry parts ;) 

Oh and here is the back side. The soldered charm I made is of course, two sided.  So something else you definitely can't tell from the picture is that all of teh little round lampwork spacer beads are actually this really dark blue glitter. It appears black, but its a really sweet odd lot glass(figures, right? Me using odd lot glass ;) called Dark Blue Aventurine by Bullseye.

Well I hope you enjoyed my design process and my product review! Why not hop on over to Art Beads and nab up some of these fabulous products?

Much love,

Genea

**Disclaimer I have received these products free of charge by Artbeads.com. I am honestly reviewing the products and have not been paid for my endorsement as it pertains to the products received.**