Hmmmmm so this week has passed fairly quick again.
It was the latter end of the Easter school holidays and it seemed like my eldest daughter was only here 5 mins then she was back at school :-(
Making has been slowed down somewhat with having her here as I was doing loads of cool mum stuff with her being here and our youngest daughter loved having her big sis here too :-)
I have also for some reason felt really pants, I feel really deflated and yacky so my creative head has not been on at all apart from making my new amazing storage for my jewellery see my last blog here.
The bead fairy has not been kind at all. I have tried to make some bits and bobs but have ended up putting it all back on the bead tray half made.
I did last week get this very pretty in pink bracelet made :-)
It hasn't sold yet so come and grab it quick while you can.
It is a beautiful heart shaped handmade lampwork glass beads wire wrapped onto some oval links with a hand dip dyed silk ribbon finished off with a delicious rose toggle clasp :-)
I also made a triple strand black and white bracelet but it has sold already, I am not surprised it is a true beauty of a bracelet.
It has my favourite black ceramic beads and has a black strand of chain and a strand of black and white teenie weenie peanut shaped beads that love to ping everywhere but where they should go the pesky little things!!
So on the note that I only have two things to show you here are some other pictures that I can share with you :-)
A cute puppy in a cup because I can :-)
I feel quite like the flat dog on the floor at the moment, not even enough energy to stand up while eating...
Last one because I think you are all ace :-)
So I hope the bead fairies start being nice to me and let my creativity flow soon and I feel back to normal!
Keep your fingers crossed for me.
Take care and speak soon :-)
Catherynne
Catherynne's Treats
Ok so own up who has loads of beautiful jewellery????
I put my hand up for sure since I started making jewellery my collection has grown somewhat!
I have struggled to find a way of storing them properly so they don't get all squished or lost or even just hidden to the back so you forget what it looks like.
I have a very pretty wooden box that houses all my earrings and three of the jewellery hangars shaped like a lady with millions of arms to hold everything on but I have long necklaces that don't fit on properly and I also always despite my earring box never actually moving always manages to loose some earrings under a million others and always get all tangled up :-(
So upon my travels over the blogging world I came across this blog to make your own Earring/clip holder tutorial Here. It is a fabulous idea but I am not a massive fan of painting and it meant I had to go all the way into town and buy an old picture frame and then tinker with it till it is right.
That is all well and good for some people but I didn't fancy that but did like the idea so I took my creative brain to the task of wanting to tidy up my jewellery area.
I love blank canvases, we have loads around the house with various sized prints of hands and feet from my girls and I love them :-)
They are something that you can always treasure and look on very fondly especially those feet ones where there is another foot print as your eldest daughter over balanced and then splatted her foot in the middle of the canvas thus plonking another foot print right in the middle of the canvas!!
So my love of canvases popped out, hmmm what if I went and bought some canvases and then sewed on the lace like in the tutorial???
So I wizzed down the road to a local shop I know has them for not much money and bought a pack of three. Two quite long thin ones and one larger rectangle one.
I found my sewing box with in it various different pieces of lace in and promptly got to sewing two onto the first canvas. I got a bit exited and didn't measure what I was doing so the first strip of lace went on wonkey. The second one went on better and hey presto I was on my way. I put in some drawing pins in the top so I can hang bracelets off it and then did the same with the other thin canvas.
Then off I toddled with my hammer and some nails, bopped some holes in the wall with my toddler watching me thinking I must now be Manny from Handy Manny going bang, bang, bang!
I put up the two thin canvases and got straight onto hanging my earrings off the lace. With it being lace you can hang the earrings anywhere you want to. It doesn't work very well with stud earrings so for that I will still keep my wooden box, plus it looks pretty so am not getting rid of it!
I got too exited to go back downstairs to get the other drawing pins so hammered in panel pins to the top of the larger canvas for my necklaces to hang from.
I put loads of my necklaces onto this after I put it on the wall and wow I can fit so many on it was amazing!!!
I now have a fabulous storage facility for my necklaces, earrings and bracelets and also wall art as it looks damn good in the corner of my room :-)
I am pleased as punch with it and so much so now I can see everything I spent bloomin ages trying to decide which jewellery I was going to wear today!!!!!
Looking at these it does look quite cluttered still but trust me it is not.
I can see everything straight away and everything is nicely spaced out with the two thin canvasses for earrings and most of my bracelets with a couple of necklaces.
The necklace one I can see all of the perfectly and go hmmmmmmmmmm which one today.
I still have some on the three jewellery stands on my bedside cabinet :-)
How cool does it all look now!
Oh this was a before shot I took a while ago, I could never see what I had as it was all a massive jumble of beads :-(
This is one of those it looks better in real life than in the photos lark though. These make my corner look all dingy but believe me it is not, it is lovely and bright and now all my jewellery is a lovely focal point in our bedroom :-)
Not bad for only £5 eh
Take care and speak soon
Catherynne
Catherynne's Treats
Good morning :-)
As lots of you know Catherynne's Treats is now the grand old age of 1 and the changes that have happened in that year has been vast.
I now have a new direction that I want to share with you all that Catherynne's Treats is going to take and I am really really exited about it!
I am going to take you back about a month first to my starting position.
I was looking at some truly amazing beads from Beadscrumptious Beads a lady that makes her own lampwork beads dribbling at them as they look so pretty and are just amazing.
It got me thinking how do you actually make them so I pulled up a You Tube window and put it in the search bar and then clicked on the first one that came up and whoaaaaaa it is so interesting :-)
You melt the glass over a small torch so you have a molten blob then you wind it round a long piece of metal called a mandrel that has been coated in a special liquid called bead release so that you can wriggle the bead off when it is ready or the bead will be welded onto the mandrel and you don't want that!!
You can do so many different tricks with the glass to make it look amazing.
You can make a plain round bead then melt on some dots, you can melt them into the glass then melt a layer of clear over the top so then the dots are encased in the bead and are in the middle of the bead.
Well the list is totally endless and is only limited to your own imagination!!
So on this note I have been watching LOADS and I mean LOADS of different You Tube vids and reading articles and have even bought a book that I have read cover to cover twice!!
So on this note I have joined a forum called Frit-Happens and have read even more about making your own beads and some lovely person on their recomended that I go to the annual Flame Off an event for Lampwork artists to have a go on lots of torches there, see demonstrations and also spend about a billion pounds on all the equipment and supplies there and then there are the finished beads too!
So I toddled off to Silverstone Circuit as that was where it was being held.
Being brought up watching Formula 1 for most of my upbringing I was totally in awe of where I was and even though there was not a race going on I was still very exited to be going who wouldn't be really.
When I got there in the end after putting the wrong postcode into the sat nav whoops, we had to follow signs to 'The Wing' which is where it was being held. I was following the signs very carefully until I had to drive past a Porsche experience area where there were soo many amazing Porsche's parked outside and then I saw two cars being driven down some track through loads of water being sprayed all over the road so it was wet conditions. Whoooaaaaaaaaaa how cool was that except I was way to busy taking notice of the cars and then totally missed the turning for the wing!
So I turned round and found where I had to go which was over the track eeeek and wow, and when I did I though hmmm my car is making a lot of noise and got over the bridge and looked to my left and holy moses nope it wasn't my car I just drove over a bridge when a F1 car went underneath me!!!!! I didn't have any spare clothes to get changed into but wow I almost had an accident when it sank in I just drove over a F1 car!!!!!!!
Anyway I got there in the end and popped my eyes back into my head and put my sensible head on and went into the building.
The room was laid out lovely with lots of vendors to both sides of the room and the torch area to the back so I casually looked at some of the stalls while making my way to the back of the room to the torches and asked a lady with a high viz jacket on if I can make some beads?? She kindly asked me if I had made any before to which I replied no and she took charge and showed me what to do.
So now it was my turn, I am sat on this chair with this quite small but extremely hot flame in front of me I got a purple rod ( I am really drawn to purple at the mo and I am not sure if it will wear off for a while yet ) I twiddled it round and melted it nicely and got it ready to twist onto the mandrel to make the bead. I did and then wound it onto the mandrel, it was quite lopsided so I kept it in the flame till it had melted in much better and was much more round :-)
Then I popped it into a big pot of round balls to cool it down called bubbles and got to making my next bead. I made 5 all in all on my first go. One of the beads I was totally mushing up the glass and just having fun with it really so that one is a mess of colours but it's my mushed up bead :-)
It was so interesting melting the glass and then deciding what I wanted to do with it.
I made the beads then decided that I had best go and have a look about.
Wow there are so many different talented artists that can truly make magic with glass!
It wasn't long before I decided that I had best get back to the torches again and make some more beads. This time though I was going to make some multi coloured ones and try out some of the techniques that I have been watching so much on You Tube.
I made a few more with purple glass, wrapping the molten glass round the mandrels again and then put some decorations on using a glittery glass. Wow Goldstone glass is soo pretty to use.
The second lot of beads were much more fun to make and I was taking the bead making much more seriously and you can tell as the beads are much better.
To buy the all the kit to get me going to be able to make the beads is a lot of money so unfortunately it won't be for a while before I can afford it all and then it will be even longer before I can actually make any beads that are of a good enough quality to sell or use in my jewellery but goodness making those beads was so much fun and I am totally hooked and really cannot wait till I can have another go :-)
So enough yacking and now time for the pictures of what I made :-)
The first picture are my first beads, the second is the bunch I made the second time with some close up's of some of the more snazzier beads from the second time around.
I am really proud of these as I really thought I would just be making a blob with a hole in the middle but I didn't :-)
So I need you all to buy up all my stock over at Catherynne's Treats so that I can start to save up to buy the kit I need to make amazing glass beads !!
Take care and speak soon
Catherynne
Hellooooooo :-)
I have had quite a grown up day today as myself and hubby treats to be had a child free afternoon today.
We went to the cinema and watched Jack the Giant Slayer in 3D and whoa was it good and then we went and ate loads of Mexican food at Chiquitos, om nom nom :-)
I am going to admit that I was looking at Ewan McGreggor in it thinking 'is it you, no it's not, is it, mmmmm noo, hang on I think actually it is' and it took me quite a while to figure it out, well they were climbing up the beanstalk by the time I figured it out doh me!
Oh and Mexican food is my all time ohhhhhh mmmmmmm food so going to Chiquitos with no children saying 'Mum I need a wee, oh I spilled my drink, mum when will the food be here' and various other children noises was utter bliss.
We came home and still had about an hour and a half with no children before they were delivered back to us all safe and very full of beans from being out all day but took all of 3 seconds to go to sleep as they were that tired!!
So in honour of my super dooper happy mood I have today offered all jewellery with £2 off and my fabric flowers are buy one get one half price, which means you get two flowers for £3.50!!!
All fabric flowers can be made in what ever colours you want and amounts that you want too :-)
I shall be extending the sale till Sunday night 8PM on 7th April whooo :-)
Here are some new pieces of jewellery I have made this week and are included in my super happiiieeeee sale!
This is a delicious red and white necklace with a handmade ceramic red heart with an unusual wire twist focal. The beads go right up to an easy to fasten lobster clasp and is now just down to £8 in my super happiiieeeee sale!
This is a floating necklace with a delightful glass heart pendant wire wrapped with co-ordinating blue and white beads, tigers eye reflective beads and some teeny bicone shaped Tibetan silver beads and yup you guessed it now down to £8 too in my happpiiieeee sale :-)
This is a total favourite of mine, this is a bracelet made using a Bo Hulley Beads blue connector bar and I have made it into a double strand bracelet with deliciously shiny beads and some more of the reflective cats eye beads. They catch the light and move along the bead when you move it, they are so mesmerising to look at. This is normally £15 but in my happiiieeee sale this is now just £13, not bad huh!!
As with all my pieces they are all one of a kind deliciously unique so when you buy something from me you know you are getting something that only you will have and can treasure forever :-)
I am going to leave you with two more pics, the first one is the prize for my birthday giveaway.
I spent aaaages trying to choose what to send the lucky lady and in the end I settled on a necklace and bracelet for her and she now has them so I can share with you all what she now has.
Last but certainly not least is the bracelet I have made for myself for our wedding in 3 months. I totally love it and CANNOT wait to wear it as it is soo purdy :-)
I can make something like this again upon request, all you have to do is ask :-)
I am very pleased with the way it came out and if you can imagine it looks even nicer in the flesh!!
So on that snazzy note I am going to toodle off and make a cup of tea and leave you to what you were doing before I interrupted you.
Take care and speak soon ( Oh and don't forget to snap up my jewellery quick before someone else does)
Catherynne
Catherynne's Treats
