Well, my studio is just about complete, I am hanging pictures and working on my glass wall storage and generally still de-dusting, if that is a word!!!  I am so excited that I will be back to work so there will be a lot more beads at Yelton’s sometime in the near future.  My friends from Chicago are coming wednesday and I am excited to see them.  When they leave I will be sad but I will be ready to be in the studio all day long, everyday!!!  While I might be as excited as a Bird of Paradise, I am certainly not as interesting of a subject!!  Check out this video made by Planet Earth, the world of creatures make me smile from ear to ear and dance from the inside!! 

Well, I am gearing up for the debate party I am going to tonight!  The election this year is more important than ever and I am going to be rooting on my guy and of course chastising the other guy!  Of course I am not injecting politics into this blog because this is a place where people can come freely and not have opinions forced on them.  So, I will keep “my guy” a secret, except to my friends in attendance.  I am sure it will be a riotous event and I will have a good time.  Aside from politics my space got painted today and the ceiling will be tomorrow.  It is getting closer and I am going bonkers to get on the torch at this point, maybe I am addicted to the propane and I am having withdrawal??  Hmmmmm!  No, I am missing my glass, it is sooo pretty and fun to work with.  Enjoy your weekend!!!

moar funny pictures

Ok, well, um, I am sooooo bored beyond belief.  I can only do so much laundry, cleaning and label making.  Yes, I am making labels for all of my glass because I am determined to be organized.  If you work with glass you will understand when i say this.  How many times have you mixed up your glass only to open the kiln and have a cracked bead??  Well, I do not do that very often BUT for the purpose of my organization I had to write something.  i am very excited because when i went to see Corina she had this cool way of wall organization of glass so she could see what she had with the glass lying horizontal and not in cubbies, this way the light grabbed on and you could look up and see right away if you had a glass that you wanted or were inspired by just looking at all of it.  However, since I have soooo many colors, probably at least 100 or more (I don’t really know so I guess I will find out) it will be nice to display it this way.  I will show you pictures once it is up.  As of right now, the builders are NOW coming friday, saturday and sunday.  So I will probably be on the torch by Tuesday and my friends come on Wednesday!!  They can give me ideas!  As of right now the walls are primed but the ceiling is not up yet and then they have to paint the walls and the cement floor.  Whew, I am really getting impatient because I want to be in my new room.  Check out this kitty, man oh man my dogs would be mince meat!!! You have to run your computer mouse over the black box to get the arrow to play this cute video! Meow!

Funny Videos

Ok, this is just sooooo funny!  Enjoy!

Soooo, the builders will be here tomorrow to do my ceiling, paint my walls and move my stations out to paint the concrete floor.  The end is in sight, but the dust is NOT!  Bare with me and I should have beads in the next week or so!  Right now it is impossible to torch because everything is unhooked and they have to bring my ventilation down to put up the ceiling.  So, there is not much to talk about in the way of “interesting” banter.   These are my words for the day, “Express Yourself”!

Well, so I have been still down as far as the torch goes, too much dust AND they had to disconnect from the oxy and propane because they were going around the hoses putting up the drywall and encasing my outside to inside hoses with a cooler look than just holes in the brick!!!  Yay!  So, i have been reading, well, and making homemade vegetable beef soup!  I have gone so far to make my own broth and believe me that is really not like me at all!  So anyway, I have compiled a list of recycleable items that can help out charities, imagine helping others less fortunate out?  I am so lazy sometimes that I forget that lots of different items can help others you would not think of and so I thought I would point them out to you!

CELL PHONES - The Wireless Foundation fixes old phones and then hands them out to domestic violence survivors (www.calltoprotect.org)

COMPUTERS - You can donate old computers to www.Nextsteprecycling.org and they will repair them and give them to schools that are underfunded and needy families

CROCS (Yes i typed CROCS) - Take your old crocs and mail them to Crocs Recycling West, 3375 Enterprise Ave., Bloomington CA 92316 and they will recycle them into new shoes and donate them to underpriviledged families.  NOW THAT is NOT a croc!!!

EYEGLASSES (METAL) - Donate old or broken glasses to www.neweyesfortheneedy.com and they will fix them and give them to the needy.  Also you can donate sunglasses and plastic frames in good condition as well.  If you do not want to send them, stop at any LensCrafters or Target Optical and they will send them to www.givethegiftofsight.org

GADGETS - Recycle PDA’s MP3 players and other devices to www.Recycleforbreastcancer.org and they will send you prepaid shipping labels.  They will then recycle them and donate the proceeds to breast cancer charities.  It is a win/win because they also stay out of landfills.

HEARING AIDS - used hearing aids, any make or model even if they are quite old can be fixed and be donated for reuse to someone who cannot afford or does not have healthcare.  Go to www.donateglasses.net/hearingaids.html and you can find a collection center

HOLIDAY CARDS - St. Jude’s Ranch for Children www.stjudesranch.org (a non-profit home for abused an neglected youths) uses old cards for the kids who cut off the fronts of the old cards and glue them onto new cards and sell them in which they earn money and it creates confidence in them.

*****CFL lightbulbs might last a long time but be careful if they break because they have mercury in them.  You should wear rubber gloves and ventilate the room for 15 minutes.  Clean up the debris with cardboard and secure small pieces with duct tape and put it all in a plastic bag, seal it up and throw it in the trash

This is just some of the things I found informative in the September issue of REAL SIMPLE!  If you want to see more, and there is LOTS more, buy yourself a copy!!!  I loved this months copy, so much so that it was real simple to give you all a little info!!!!

OH YEAH, PICS OF MY STUDIO, IT IS SOOOO BIG, I AM SOOOO LUCKY!!  As you can see, not much going on there in the way of making beads, I cannot wait to show the finished pics.  Oh, and the first picture is the finished part TRASHED, ugh!!!!

Yes, I have a window that is in the insided of my house so I can see out to the woods through the house and get also natural light.  the door opening will be double french doors with NO grids, just glass!

my covered work areas for my two torches and my great ventilation piped outside

The left side going to the new unfinished part, double doors will go there and my desk and computer will be to the left of those in an L shape

Peace!!!

Hello all, i will have the beads there on Monday but they have been so crazy getting back to normal and Tina out of town that they will be on the floor Wednesday, so try and stop by or call then!    Check out these Angora Bunnies, are they the funniest or what???  I know I need a haircut and color but this is ridiculous!  They are adorable, what you can see of them!!

 ”Help me, someone put me up on this table and if I move I will fall!”

Yes, it is official,  the builders are currently in the basement working on my new studio and I am hoping to maybe be in there one more day for more beads before the drywall guys come.  It will be way to dusty then and the ceiling will require me to unhook everything.  Right now I can sneak in there until Saturday.  It is so loud today while they build the walls, they started just 2 hours ago and I have a kiln full of beads so hopefully I will like them.  There will be no more delays, wind, rain or shine, they will be there on Monday.  The update on my back is that I will have surgery when I can no longer stand it.  Picking up sticks and stuff really threw me over the edge and I am not moving very well.  It is so hard to stand out there and stare at people clean up when you want to help.  I cannot rake, that motion will put me in bed, but bending down with my legs and picking smaller pieces up I thought would be ok, uh, NOT!!  I am so peeved!  What is worse is that Mark yelled at me the whole time to stop and I said , “oh, this will be fine honey, no problem”!  He replied “I really mean it Steph, stop”!  I said “No honey, I am not going to just stand here” and he said “I don’t want to hear it when you cannot move”!  DRATS!!  I hate it when he is right!  Ugh!  Oh well, take a look at this Japanese prank, don’t worry you do not see any major body parts!!!  This is hysterical, just like all the others.  Those Japanese people are funny, what senses of humor they have!  I love it!!!!  You have to wait until the end though because the prank changes and it is laugh out loud funny.  Just imagine if this was you!!  But really, who walks around naked like that?  We women know better, ha ha!!

Sooooo, today is day three of the problems in our area with power outtages and water issues.  Most of the stuff in our yard is up but a lot of people are still sawing away on those big trees.  So, Ohio is the Buckeye state and I was lucky to have the biggest Buckeye tree in the state located just 1 mile away.  It has been there for over one hundred years, I am not sure how long exactly, but it was one big tree and has the record of size and longevity in all of Ohio.  It did not survive the wind storm unfortunately and it is very sobering to me because it literally started as a sapling with no population surrounding it and stood there tall and strong as our area grew to surround it and now it is gone, just like that!  I know it is a tree, but so many big old trees were lost and I find it to be very sad.  Well, anyways my dad is still without power and is making his coffee on a propane burner but now has a generator.  My mom was not affected thank goodness, it was one of the small areas left intact.  Ok, beads!!!!  So, i will have beads to Yelton’s by the end of the week, sorry for the delay, it is what it is!!!  All take care!!!!!

Champion State Buckeye tree that was 142 feet high and 151 inches around (that is over 12 feet diameter, that should put it in perspective)  that was lost in the storm on Sunday.  It had a brass plaque located on its trunk verifying it as the “champ”!!!  An era gone by!  Sad

Trees everywhere, houses with holes in them, tarps, no electricity (we have it now, thank goodness we are lucky) no running water and the the list goes on.  Home depot was out of chain saws but leave it to my hubby to call me after i left him a message while I was at Home Depot to call back and say he went early in the morning before work so he would get one.  He is on his way home to start cutting up these trees and beginning the clean up of our yard and landscaping.  My friend has no water or electricity and is on her way over here to bring her food to put in my fridge/freezer downstairs.  They will be back later to take a shower.  I do not know how the electric went on here because we had it last night, it was only out for about 4 hours.  However, if you go 3 miles away, nothing!  It is weird seeing people everywhere cleaning and sawing and up on top of their houses.  We are not used to this in this part of the country.  It is great though to see people rally together and be neighborly!  So many people tear our country down but when push comes to shove we are a helping people.  I think that mankind in general is really a helpful species it is just that people get caught up in their own lives and do not reach out until they see something or someone suffering.  I can only say I pray for all of the people who were just affected by Ike, our little storm is nothing compared to that and our city is shut down!!!  Needless to say, I have not been on the torch today and the beads that were in the kiln yesterday were kaput.  Also, Yelton’s is closed, well, everything is closed, there is not ice anywhere in the city!!  ok, have a great day, things could be worse.

three of the trees down, and my cedar box picked up and placed in the woods, ugh!!!

Well, we had wind like I have never seen before and it took down 5 of our trees today.  we were without power, and it was kind of scary.  All of you from around here know what I mean!  All of the gas pumps were down and everything was closed because the whole city electricity went out.  Crack, crack, crack, that is what i heard all over the place, just trees coming down all over.  I saw 3 in 5 minutes, I was really worried that the big oak that we have would come down and fall in the middle of the house.  Unfortunately the beads in my kiln did not make it due to the power outage.  I had some pretty ones in there too!  Some of them cracked too!!  Oh well, i do have a few from this morning that came out so enjoy!  also, watch this, I love this prank, I saw this a couple of years ago.  I would have freaked out too, that is so mean to do to us animal lovers, hee hee!!!!!

Sooooo, just a few practice beads today!  Just trying to work on the stringer but not really into it right now!  I have still been cleaning out my room and the basement in which it needs to go for the time being.  Ugh, it has turned into a garage sale, a champion throwing things away party, a national stair collection of stuff that needs to be taken up stairs and put in its proper place wherever that it party, and to top it all off a “I have to make beads” event!  I worked with some dichro today, hopefully the kiln will give me something pretty, if not i will work again tomorrow!  I have to be ready for beads to go to yelton’s on tuesday!!!  Anna and Andrea (one of my adopted daughters) playing around with Amanda’s Halloween wig.  Andrea said she will be funny and use this smile (the girls think it is funny) for her spring pictures where they have to pose, not the fall pics which get given to the friends.  Oh, t0 be young again and goofy! 

Well, today I was still cleaning out my studio and moving the basement around so the builders can start putting it all together.  Yes, I will have walls and a ceiling and bright colors and white walls and well, anything other than grey unfinished basement should do the trick.  You know, it is hard to be creative when you do not have a window or a space that seems like a space, ya know??  I am so excited to get my studio finished.  I have new stuff to work on and i will have a new studio, wow, I feel lucky.  Oops, I am not sure you all knew I was doing that!  I get sometimes bothered when i have to go down there in the evening because it is not cozy, more like a dungeon feel to it so I am really looking forward to the change.  I will have one last shipment to Yelton’s and then I will be down for two to three weeks.  Have a great night!!  Well, hopefully better than this guy!!!  You just gotta love him!!!!  i think this is what it would look like if a dog got dentures, hee hee!   Like a pitbull minus the lipstick, politics!!  Like highschool all over again!

Come on ladies, send me pics of yourselves wearing my beads and of course i do not mind a little troll thrown in!!!  i want to start a customer base on this site so i know what you look like and what beads you like.  just send it to me through my email  stephhandermann@fuse.net and make it small and i will put it on a new page here!!  If you ever want to know anything comment me or email me, I don’t bite I am chomping only at the bit to get you ladies excited to share photos of yourselves striking a pose with your great beads on!!!  Also, i have added another quote to my quote page so check it out and email me with one of yours so i can keep putting new quotes on my page.  You know, just something that really speaks to you!!!  Well i am outta here and off to bed, i have to get up early!

First off, the beads that were made here by Corina were quickly put together without any real thought out plan to show a technique to me.  These do not necessarily demonstrate a bead that she would sell, however there are a couple that I bought that are just stupendous in their own right but of course my photos do not do them justice.  I also have a feeling that Corina, in her German accent would say “never take a picture of a bead in your hand because it does not look professional”!!  Well, I do not have the picture thing down yet nor the camera or photoshop to take out the backgrounds so these are just me, beads, a camera, and my dogs sitting on the driveway!  Hee Hee!  Sorry Corina (sad lower lip face)!  You guys get the idea, they are fun and I will explain what she was trying to teach in each bead!!! 

This is a bead that was to show me how you could decorate with stringer and then by using the colors that she chose, get the reactions in the glass and shrinkage in the design leaving a really cool bead!!  Again, quickly produced at Corina speed to show me a technique and not how great she is!!!

This is her take on Ammonite and she used ivory and silver which makes an awesome background.  This was a stringer technique using goldstone stringer and a few murrinis thrown in clinging to the sides of this bead.  It is amazing how you can actually draw with stringer but you are not drawing.  If you ever knew that you had to move the bead not the stringer, it is backwards and mind boggling.  Here is mine:

Not quite the same huh?  Well, practice practice practice!!!

More stringer control!  This bead was actually pressed AFTER the stringer was applied.  Mine is the right one, a little fuzzy and not as crisp of lines, again, more practice but not so bad this time.

This is a bead that she made on a bigger mandrel like i use and this was to demonstrate how to make a bead with two colors pulling a two color ribbon and placing it over silver without melting the silver off.  As you can see the two colors effect the silver differently, one is gold and the other is silver.  Very cool!  She whipped this out in no time just using quickly placed white flowers so you could see the color underneath.  I liked it, she did not!!!  which goes to show that we are critical of our own work, huh?????  Bad habit for me!

This was a practice for goldstone stringer and learning how to place silver lined dots, oh my gosh I will be using these in a lot of my beads.  You guys will be screaming “NO MORE SILVER LINED DOT BEADS”!!  Ha!  Oh, mine is on the right.  Doesn’t it look so cool how hers is like a cabachon and looks like a real gem?  love it!

Well, this is an example of one of her groundhog beads made on a bigger mandrel which makes it more bagel like and not as much a round bead.  The reason I took the picture this way is because it shows how one can design a bead by crossing stringer lines over dots and vice versa.  Hers is on the left, DUH, I love this look!  I am going to try these on my beads.

These are dichroic beads with silver laden glass used for dots, although the scroll bead is lined in the same silver glass, not dichroic!  My bead is the bigger bead and the rest are Corina’s using stringer decoration of course because that is what I wanted to learn.  The frog bead on top was a gift to me and it just went with the others so I had to give it a home on top of the other cool beads!!!  I love Dichro and silver glass so this will be something I will be doing a lot of and they are so sparkly you will love them.  My pictures really are not good you have to see these in person to know how pretty they are.  On Tuesday of next week there should be new beads at yelton’s with new things I learned!

   I bought this, I loved him and the quark that he lives on!!

This is the only Lily she has ever done and I had a hard time getting a picture of it, I believe it is on her site so if you want to check it out there you will have a better idea just how wonderful this is.  I wore this on the plane coming home from Seattle and did not even make it on the plane and the flight attendant said “oh my gosh, that is sooooo pretty” and I gave her Corina’s card that she gave me and said, she lives here and email her!!!!  I love it and it is one of a kind, I mean she did not make another, of course ALL glass beads are one of a kind, that is just the nature of glass but i was honored to grab it out of her bead cabinet and tell Sheri “I have to have this”!!!  Corina forgive me (again, lower lip face)!

Small Corina beads that I had to have!  She had a bunch of these for an order and I swiped them and ran to sheri!!!  Poor Corina had to start making these beads again, I cannot wait to make a bracelet out of them, stay tuned!

AND FINALLY, drum roll please…….

It is MOAB MAN!  Yes, she did all of this with stringer!!!!!  The body shape was incredible, and her tricks of the trade did not fail her for sure!!!!  We were talking about a bead that we wanted to end with (I pooped out and went to bed when it was my turn because I did not have it in me)!  I said what about something ancient like Moab man found on rocks in the west.  She googled, found a picture and whipped this up!!!  Notice the beautiful colors and tiny flecks in the bead.  It looks so real!  I am absolutely honored to get a signed bead, and yes in STRINGER!!!  She does not do this for just anyone so I am special!  You know what, she is special too!!!!!!!  Signing off now (ha, get it)!

Ok, so i had to go to the doctor for sure this morning because i started to develop a low grade urinary tract infection in Washington and it came back in full swing even after the cranberry juice out there.  sooooooo, the doctor this morning and then on to my massage which i desperately needed and finally on to my daughters apartment to see it (she moved out while I was gone), she has done some cute stuff with it!!!  Then i raced home, took a shower to get the greasy massage oil out of my hair and left immediately across town to get to my other daughters volleyball game, and after all of this it is now almost 9 pm my time.  Obviously there is no light out to take the pictures because that is how i do it, the unprofessional way, hee hee!!!  Soooo, tomorrow I will take them and put them up, I promise.  Until then watch this video, you know, bodily noises are funny at any age and so I went there because it makes me laugh!  Gross you say, but still funny!!! I have never seen Cagney and lacey like this!