Well, I brought Mark home today and he is rather sore.  I was really surprised how long his cut is on his neck.  it starts in the middle of the neck and wraps 4 inches to the right, almost like someone tried to decapitate him but failed.  That is not a funny joke either, it just looks so gruesome right now.  I know that it will heal and he will feel better about it.  Me, I could care less, i am covered with scar railroad tracks.  I have had 11 surgeries in my lifetime and believe me, scars do not bother me anymore.  I guess my face would, if i had one there that disfigured me but it has made me think about things today.  As i take care of him today and see how much he hurts I am reminded of how lucky i am to have him.  I am so used to him having to take care of me with my various surgeries that it is just strange being on the other side.  I am making macaroni and cheese and giving him applesauce and icechips, etc. and he looks so helpless, it brings out the caretaker in me.  I was making a bead a little while ago and Anna came down and told me he needed me but she kindof sounded like he needed me right then, i chucked the bead and ran upstairs and lo and behold he just needed some more cranberry juice and he had told her not to bother me if i was in the middle of a bead and she did not hear him i guess.  Oh well, it’s just glass and i decided to turn it all off and run the couple of beads i had and come upstairs.  There is always tomorrow, I guess i will feel better once i know he is completely ok without me. 

I am making a lot of black and white and I will have about 15 or so on Monday at Yelton’s I think.  It might be Tuesday, it might be more beads, i don’t know.  How about a little Christmas action before Thanksgiving? I am in the mood people!!! Here ya go!!

So, I torched some black and white beads yesterday!  I will torch again on Friday!  Today I am taking mark to the hospital, we are leaving in an hour for his neck surgery at 2 pm.  He is nervous but I am sure everything will be fine.  He is using my surgeon and I love him, he is really good.  Soooooo, i will not be torching the next few days and with turkey day and all I will do my best friday/sat/and sun to get some beads over to Yelton’s around the first of the week next week.  Not to worry though because i will be torching steadily for the coming christmas season so there will be plenty to choose from.  Oh, and those of you who ordered a bead, those are coming as well next week!!!  thanks all, off to drink one more cup of coffee before we leave.  have a great week and i will post later.  Oh, one more thing, if you have not seen the video below with the lion, please watch it,  you will love it!!!  Remember, Love Wins!!!!!!!

Well, the Kalypso beads went over great and lo and behold they were almost all gone the first day of the show.  I went busily downstairs to make some more, however with the timing on that day I did not get to make many, but no regrets, they sold as well the next day.  I was so happy to meet you all and I was especially happy to meet some of my biggest fans of my beads.  I have felt like i have known them for so long because they email me and I email them and, well, I am so happy they have the same vision as me when it comes to glass.  They appreciate what I do and sometimes that is hard to find in my world.  You know, i have school with Anna, sports, friends and aquaintances and just about anyone else that i run into in life frequently that might not really know what I do.  Soooooo, my loyal and beady friends mean so much to me that they support me and carry a part of me around with them.  Thanks to you, I keep torching and thankfully I keep making money in which to support my addiction to glass, ha!!!!  Well, mark likes that i make the money too!!!!  ladies, you know what i mean! 

Also, I had so much fun with the Yelton’s staff, they always make me feel so welcome when i come skipping (not literally) in with my beads.  I am happy to be a part of their bead family and I truly had such a good time yesterday (my feet were mad from standing all day but I rule over them).  i have an appreciation for how hard they work during their days there.  They deliver the most awesome customer service I have seen and they are the best in their business, i really believe that.  Thanks so much yelton’s, you are the BEST!!!!!!!  Next time, we will get more beads in there to start with, ha ha!!!

A shot of Tina doing what she does best, helping her customers, oh and being “Sergeant Pepper”

 Denise from Arizona, I just love her!!!!  She is such a character like me, I love her spirit!!!  She made a bead at my house and of course she bought a lot more, ha!!!!  Thanks Denise!!!!!  Have a safe trip back girlfriend!!

This is Robin, she loves to order beads from me and also buy them.  I cannot thank her enough for her support as well as the absolutely beautiful way she wears my beads.  Take a look at this!!!

These were being worn on a Troll Fantasy necklace down low and let me tell you, these are bigger beads.  They look “fabulous” like that, that is what is so cool, that i actually get to see people wearing my beads and how they love to display them.  How lucky am I????  You Rock Robin!!!!

Judy looking at Robin’s necklace.  I made a bead for Judy (Beatles collection) and I named it “Hey Jude”!!!  You gotta love Judy, she is so sweet to me.  I wish I would have taken snapshots of everyone but I did not find the time.  These were the people that actually had a moment to get near me when all of a sudden, “click”, sorry you are now going to be on my blog!!!  ha!

And, drum roll please, last but not least- Debra!!!!!  She came back from out of town later on Friday and found out that there were slim pickins left on the beads.  No worries mate, I will make more!  I love Debra, she always emails me and comments on my blog!!!  Not many people do but I can always count on Debra.  She buys many beads as well and I feel like i have known her forever.  Just imagine two people that never stop talking - Yeah, it’s like that!!!!  ha ha!!!!  I am so happy to have finally met her. 

My new postcard and some of the beads that were sold this weekend!  These were big beads!!!!  Thanks Jeffs Photography - Jeff@JeffSphotography.com
  http://www.jeffsphotography.com - 513-702-0911  He did a fabulous job and He is a great event photographer as well.  He specializes in Weddings and let me tell you, he is wonderful!!!!!!!!

This is one of the best things I have ever seen!!!!  Stay tuned for news about the trunk show!!  Enjoy!

You guys have been so faithful, checking every day to see if I have added anything to this blog, thanks so much!  I dropped my beads off today at yelton’s and I am so excited to meet all of the local customers in this area on Friday.  Yay, it is so much fun to see my beads get new homes and to see why people choose the bead that they want.  It will probably give me a new perspective on what people want to see out of my beads.  Please give me suggestions if you want, I never have claimed to be an expert or anything, really still a novice with a lot of passion.  Hopefully i can get someone to take pictures at the trunk show!!!!!  Thanks for being so patient, i promise to make some more beads and put up pictures!!  In the meantime, watch this little girl, you might have seen her before, she is adorable.  How inspiring it is to see someone so young and innocent with such pure talent.  Enjoy! I remember the first time i ever heard Michael sing this, i was a little girl!!!

So, I am still getting ready for the trunk show and thought I would give you all something do while you wait, well, uh, really i just need memory practice.  It seems that I have hit the age in which you need to worry about your brain age.  i know that red wine helps, maybe I can forgo these games and drink my memory into focus?  Not so much!  I am not sure that wine+torch and fire=wisdom!!!  Go ahead, give it a try, you know you want to, or maybe you NEED to.

Why is it that now i have to have every spot on my glass wall filled to the brim with glass?  I still have glass sitting in a bin that needs to be put somewhere else on my wall, ugh!!!  I cannot stop buying glass, help!!!  heehee!!  Have a great Veterans day, it is my dad’s birthday and we are leaving to go see him.  I love him and I am thankful that I have him to see on his birthday.  Give someone you love a hug!!!!

my glass wall, but wait, there will be another one!!!

Oh my, missing glass!  Those are spots for new colors that will come out!!  I had to think ahead, but i hate the emptiness it implies, boo hoo!

My bullseye glass that has been shamefully put in a bin awaiting a new “proper” place.  i love the yummy colors in their palette it is just that they have to be separate because they cannot be mixed with the others on the wall due to their coefficients (trust me)!
more animals

Ok, in a nutshell:

1.  raised decoration should be firmly attached, meaning the foundation of the dot should be as wide as the dot above it so it does not pop off easily

2.  Annealing - a bead should be properly heated and cooled in such a way as to relieve the stress that naturally occurs in a bead so that it does not break down the road.

3.  The edges of a bead should not be pointy and sharp, in general beads should have a smooth surface.  sometimes this is hard with round beads but most of the time these will be put into a piece of jewelry and will bump up against another item so as not to be seen.

There you have it Debra and for all of you who did not get my ramblings earlier, who knows, maybe some of you did, i know i understood it but i was working on a lot of coffee.  hee hee!!!!!  These are the general things that make a good bead good and if these three are lacking it might just be a bad bead.

Oh, it will be turkey day soon and i thought i would post this picture of my chorus line of turkeys in my backyard!  In the winter there about 30 if not more that come to my house and eat.  I love these guys and gals, they really are fun to watch.  enjoy!!

Do you really know if your dentist or doctor is employing good infection control in their offices, or whether you are getting good advice from your accountant?  Always question what you are getting!  This goes for beads as well.  I really wanted to expand your knowledge of a good bead vs. a bad bead in the glass world.  There are several things you should consider when you look for a glass bead because there are a lot of bad beads out there.  I have looked at so many pictures of beads in the magazines and books and online and it occurred to me that my customers should know what they are getting when they buy one of my beads.  You could call me a perfectionist about endeavors i set out to accomplish, one of them being Martial arts (bear with me).  I am a martial artist who spent many years perfecting my kicks, punches and the like.  When i watch work out tapes where martial arts is used, or maybe even a movie where an actor who was not formally trained until the movie, is kicking, I seem to pick apart the areas where they are not doing things correctly.  I don’t know, it is just my nature because i concentrate on the little details of knowledge because therein lies the difference between the good and the bad.  A foot should have an angle to its kick (not that you would understand) where the heel would strike the opponent under the chin or in the gut,  just like a raised dot on a bead should be anchored in a way that it will not pop off.  If there is an undercut, kind of like the dot is a moutain and you can run under the dot and tuck away in a little area that would not be hit by the sunshine, that is BAD because the stablility of the dot is in jeopardy.  You would not build a house larger on the top than the foundation because that would be not acceptable in the architecture world.  I see this time and time again in beads, maybe sets that an online artist, even magazines for goodness sake, are displaying to the public.  Another area that just drives me crazy is annealing.  This is the heating (high temps) of a bead and then cooling at a slow rate until it has passed the temperature at which the stress point of the glass is achieved.  This is my definition I am sure there are better ways to describe it out there.  Glass goes through expansion and contraction and if the stress of the glass is not alleviated then eventually it will crack.  You see this with a lot of glass beads in bulk from all over as well as beadmakers that are advertising.  They might be cheap, they might even be expensive but you will not know unless you ask the question to the beadmaker on whether their beads are annealled properly, and properly is the operative word here.  Alot of people just cool their beads at a slower rate in a fiber blanket and to me that is not good enough.  Some feel that if their bead is small enough to not crack in the fiber blanket than the stress has been worked out of it and it is annealed.  A kiln is also costly to buy and costly to run.  There are different ideas of whether this is good or bad but i would rather just be sure so I spend the extra money to be certain.  My beads go through a process at 980 degrees and it takes them 5 hours to ramp down until i can get them out of the kiln.  Yes it cost money to do this at these temperatures but then i know that my bead will outlive myself and it might even be around hundreds of years if not thrown repeatedly on the pavement or ceramic tile, ha!!!  Glass is glass and there are times that something will pop off due to outside stresses in the way of dropping on a hard surface like cement or ceramic.  That is why when you buy a pandora or troll bead you will find that very little design is raised on the surface of the beads and if it is, it is small and anchored firmly.  When you wear a bracelet that is repeatedly hit on a table or any surface it just makes sense to not have overly raised decoration so they take the chance of something happening out of their beads by staying low to the surface, and lets face it, there is only so much you can do with a small bead like that.  Ok, i am rambling.  When you buy one of my beads, most of the higher raised decoration will be on a bigger bead that you would wear on your neck and that is where you can get very creative.  Alright, last subject:  The ends of beads should not be overly sharp because they will chip and it is just bad workmanship.  However, in saying this, sometimes more round beads will have less of a pucker (where the glass rounds out and goes back in by the hole and it is smooth as a babies bottom) and might have a little bit of a flat surface that is less smooth.  In light of this, most of my customers do not have to worry about this because when you make a bead to fit a troll or pandora bracelet or necklace you have to use a mandrel (metal rod) that is larger in diameter and it is quite hard to produce a round bead due to the nature of the surface tension on the glass vs. the large diameter rod.  This is why you most of the time see donuts or bagel shapes in the beads of this size hole.  Don’t get me wrong, i can make a round bead but it is not a natural shape to the rod i use.  I do not know if this makes sense but just look at the shape of troll and pandora and you will see that they do not make round beads out of glass, just bagels or donuts.  None of that really matters, it just matters that you are getting a smooth end in which to have your bead slide around and not damage the necklace or bracelet that you are wearing. 

After all of this rambling I hope that you will understand a little more about glass beads and what you are looking for.  By all means, ask ask ask, it is your money and you deserve the best.  Whew, i feel much better after getting this out of my system, ha ha!!!!!

How many of you love to wake up on a Saturday morning, only to hear someone say that you have won a cruise, your car warranty is getting ready to expire, or, oh I love this one, a man talking and when you say something you realize you are talking to a recording that SOUNDS like they are casually talking to you?  So, you are saying “I am not interested and they do not stop talking and then you think “DOH, I am trying to talk to a recording”!!  Oh my, what pet peeves I have with these people who are only trying to do their jobs!  I really feel that there is no way to get away from it, even after signing up for the supposed “no bother” hotline.  So, anyway, on to my story, this lady calls to tell me that i signed up for a BMW and I say ”I am sorry, this is Saturday, I am in bed and I do not want to be bothered”.  She says “But, we can offer……..”,  and I go “CLICK”.

A couple of minutes later, ring ring, CNAM unknown, and i am thinking “are you kidding me?”, so i pick up the phone and the SAME lady says “Is there a better time to call”, and I say “Are you kidding me, you are actually calling me back?” and she says to me “Look B#*&*, I am just trying to do my job, if you do not want to be called, do not sign up, “CLICK”  Well, I now am TOTALLY awake and not in very good spirits.  I trudge out to the kitchen, look at my adorable dogs like I cannot believe they actually want to go out and potty, can you believe that, they want something from me too!!! ha ha!!  Well, not funny at that moment.  I take them out, make my coffee, feed them (begrudgingly) and thank my lucky stars that my family are not around because i might tear off their heads the moment they walk in the room and open their mouths.  I pour myself a cup of coffee (with yummy holiday spice) and decide to walk outside and watch the leaves fall.  well, it only takes me a couple of deep breaths, a squirrel busily searching through the fallen leaves like it is his last day to get ready for the coming weather, and big doggie kisses from my loyal and forgiving furry family members to help me realize that I need to be in charge of who i give the power to upset me and knock me off of my peaceful stump i reside on.  Case closed, i walk back inside and go on with my day!!! 

No torching today, i am taking one day off but i will be back on tomorrow.  Wait until you all see the beads at the trunk show!  They are turning out like i want them to, full of color and energy!!  Have a great Saturday evening!!!

So, I try and remember every day how lucky I am to have love in my life, even if it is not always peaceful, love truly is what propels us to continue pushing forward.  There has been a lot of talk about peace in the world and lets face it, human nature does not always produce peaceful results.  However, we are all capable of love and understanding, it is whether we choose to spread it to others that counts.  There is a bigger picture and it is hard to see it sometimes but love will prevail. 

There has just been so much negative energy in the election and I am so happy it is over and we can now move forward in this country.  I will hope that what is to come is change for the better and that our president elect has the guidance he needs to make the tough decisions he now faces.  Our world is scary but in my own little world I will continue to love and respect people/animals/life in general, and hopefully if we all do this, it will spread. 

Most of us believe in a higher power, whatever the name, I saw this video and it made me smile.  I hope you like it as well. 

I am still torching, i hope my shoulders and neck do not give up, ha!!  have a great day!!

Yes, it is a big day in America, people everywhere are standing in line to execute their right to vote!  It has been a long two years of watching and listening and finally the day is here.  Well anyway, our country is definately going to break records on how many people actually vote.  i hope my man wins!!  Other news, i have been busy making beads for the trunk show and here is a sneek peek!!  I made this for me to wear that day, and NO, nobody can have it or swipe it off my neck!!!  Ha ha!!!!  That is a special shout out to my friend Denise who i finally get to meet!!!!  yeah girl, you know who i am talking about, hee hee!!! 

These are the beads that i am having fun making but they take so long to make that i am producing smaller amounts when i am down in my studio.  so for right now everyone be patient and you will love the beads you see when you come to Yelton’s for the trunk show, i promise!!!   I am a busy busy girl, talk soon!!!

This is not about political left or right, this is just about supporting our troops.  This brought me to tears, as you all know, i am a veteran, I was in the Navy and I am happy to report that I saw nothing during my time in the armed forces in the way that all of the veterans in the wars have seen.  I believe in support of the soldiers because each one of them is an individual like all of us.  They have been gone from their families, they have seen horrific things and we need to say “thank you” for your service to our nation so that we can all remain “free” to live our lives the way we want to.  This is a story that will forever change the perception of the soldiers that are coming home through Dallas Fort Worth.  I applaud this group that cares deeply for the men and women who do not know what to expect when they return.  Watch this!