I haven’t posted in a while for several reasons. I took a week off to clean the house a bit, and then I got sick, but mainly I was struggling creatively. I don’t know if this is a winter phenomenon or what, but I’ve read in several blogs that other people have been having problems too. I’m not sure that knowing that helped me. I think it just added to my angst. Two things have helped bring me out of this to a degree. First, I went to a bead show last weekend and after looking at the beads people had out I realized that I don’t have to be making what I consider to be “art” with every bead. All I have to do is make nice beads. That freed me up quite a bit. The other thing I’ve been doing is making beads for Beads of Courage. These beads are round and can be any pattern or color, which is nice because I can make a single round bead and not have to worry about making a set or pair or whatever. These beads have been fun to make.

I have an Etsy shop and an Artfire shop set up – it was my New Year’s resolution to try and sell beads. Well, what with the struggling creatively and so forth I haven’t really listed anything – and here it is March already! So, I sorted through all of my beads the other day and discovered a few things. One is that I had more beads that I consider worthy of trying to sell than I thought I had. I had several focal beads and a few sets of pressed beads. The sets are just simple beads, nothing too exciting, but they are pretty (at least I think so).

Another thing I discovered sorting through my beads is that I have more duds now than I thought too. There were several beads I originally thought were good beads, but now I think they aren’t really so good. My standards have tightened up. I’m getting better at making beads. This is great, but it might mean that I need an even bigger bucket to hold my duds.

The third thing I realized while sorting through my beads – and this is a corollary to the first two things – is that I’ve made a lot of beads! I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise, but I obviously haven’t really been keeping track. After a year of torching regularly, I have quite the bead collection – most of them (by volume) duds now. But still, I have a lot of beads I consider to be good beads. I need to do something with them! I need to work on my jewelry making skills.

And finally, I want to spread an important tidbit of information. These beads are a base of Effetre Dark Sky with Raku frit. Now this color looks a lot like Turquoise to me, and it does the same thing as Turquoise. It forms dark, kind of shiny, scummy spots. Of course these spots would come off if I etched the beads, but I didn’t want to do that. So, I searched the web and found an archived lampworketc thread discussing the best way to clean these beads. After reading this info I decided to buy some toilet bowl cleaner called The Works. And it does work! And it works fast! So, I just wanted to pass that on.