Randomness

A few things that crossed my mind or happened this week . . .

~ I put the winter coats away. I can't remember ever packing up the heavy coats and boots in June, but I was afraid to do it sooner, because, you know, that would mean there would be a blizzard.

~ Gardening in low rise jeans = bad idea. Sorry neighbors.

~ The smell of my own burning skin is just not something I'd like to smell again. Or feel. Ouch.

~ My 7-year-old daughter didn't win the raffle for the class ant farm, and I'm truly disappointed. She sure wanted those ants. Her birthday is in a couple days . . .

~ The same daughter is calling her drinking straw a proboscis. So she is serious about these bugs.

~ I signed our son up for summer driving lessons yesterday. Wasn't he just playing with Matchbox cars? It goes by so fast.

~ Today is the last full day of school for the kids. I made a bookmark for my daughter's 2nd-grade teacher with animals from two of her favorite units - dinosaurs and penguins. All three of my kids have had this teacher (she is wonderful), and my youngest was born on my son's last day of school with her, almost 8 years ago.

~ This summer, I'm planning on being a tourist in Chicago. I want to take the kids on the train to the city, and I have a short list of places I'd love to go: The Shedd Aquarium for the JellyFish Exhibit, Lincoln Park Zoo (always a favorite) and China Town.

~ I'm getting our pool passes today. Is there still time to drop 10 pounds? Yeah, that's what I thought. :P

Happy Friday!

Bird Watching

My parents have a whole bunch of bird-feeders in their yard, and this year they have been attracting Baltimore orioles. These birds are a brilliant shade of orange, so it's no wonder that the way to attract them is with orange slices. Apparently the orange slices lure them in, where a nice cup of grape jelly is waiting for them to eat. This set-up can be as simple as half an orange nailed to a tree with a small dish of grape jelly next to it. Or, there are feeders designed with orioles in mind that have spots for two orange slices and a cup for the jelly in the middle. My dad set us up with one of these (after my attempts to lure an oriole with my own handmade version wasn't working), as well as a finch feeder and a feeder for suet logs.

It's only been about a week and a half since we put the feeders up and we've had great luck with the finch feeder. Here are a male and female goldfinch on a date at our feeder:

And here is a house finch on the feeder just this morning:

We still haven't had an oriole stop by, so last weekend I went to my parents' house to check out their birds. There were so many! I saw finches, woodpeckers, bluejays, a hummingbird and a Baltimore oriole:

The hummingbird was way too quick for me to get a photograph of it, but boy was it cool! Our kids are really enjoying the feeders, too. We look out the window every time we go by now, checking for birds. And we aren't the only ones:

Do you have feeders? What kind of birds do you get?

I'm still working on my bird beads. This little red hen is too chubby to fly up to the feeder, so she's just waiting on a lounge chair for someone to feed her.

Give Me The Finger

My current turtle finger companion.

That's right. I'm looking for a few good fingers, so flip 'em this way. I'd love to start selling my turtle rings (I wear one, my kids have them and my sister has one that glows in the dark), but I'd still like to experiment on someone and see how I do with sizing a ring for someone I don't see in person. I've really only used copper wire for the wire-wrapping, but hopefully I'll eventually venture out to different wires. So if you like turtles and would actually wear a glass turtle ring (made with copper wire), please leave me a comment with a way to reach you after this post. Also, make sure you know the ring size of the finger you would wear it on, and I'll contact one or two people from the comments to get the info. to make and size a ring. Thanks in advance!

Another angle of my ring.

Who You Callin' Short?

I recently moved my "studio" from my dining room to my basement. This forced me to clean off my table, and boy was that a long time coming. I was not looking forward to picking through all that glass, but I knew I'd find some goodies and glass rods I'd forgotten about buried under more glass rods. I also was hoping to find some murrini that had popped out of my tweezers while I was trying to apply it. But what I mostly wound up finding were shorts. Not the kind you wear, mind you, but short pieces of glass. Those short pieces, which are about one to two inches long, are what is left when you use a rod of glass down to where you can safely handle it. I'm pretty sure I've seen special tweezers that are made for holding those short pieces of glass, but I've never used them. Sometimes I use my mashers to hold those smaller pieces, and sometimes I'll fuse a couple of them together to make a longer usable rod. But mostly I just let them accumulate. I have a lot of shorts. I think I'd better get fusing - that's a lot of glass that could be used.

What do you do with your shorts?

Here is a random picture of my cats after I folded some warm towels. Ernie is the orange one burrowing in the blanket. Burt got the warm towels and the other black kitty is Buzz.

Murrini Monday

Have you ever seen mushroom murrini? I hadn't - until today. My glassy friend Jo from Dogmaw Glass makes it, along with lots of other designs like flowers, leaves, ladybugs and palm trees (those are super cool!). I'm loving the 'shrooms!

In other murrini news . . .

I recently received a package of murrini from a glassy friend in the UK. She is just starting to make it, and she's finding it quite addictive to make (which is good for me, because I find it very addictive to use). So one batch is a nice bright color combo of green, orange and yellow and I used it to decorate the snail above.

This penguin is sporting a really sweet slice of green murrini with a rubino center - love that!

And there was a pack of purple and blue murrini, too, which I used on the cobalt big hole bead in the above picture. I decorated the amber bead with murrini from the orange, green and yellow mix.

The artist who made this fabulous murrini is not selling it (yet). But she is thinking about it. So hopefully she will eventually and I can post all her information and you can be playing with this fabulous murrini one day, too.

Happy Murrini Monday!

Here are my latest lori and kim murrini inspired critters. A mini owl and a mini penguin.

Express Yourself

Lately I've been thinking a lot about facial expressions on my critter beads. I think it came about because I was asked to make a flock of funny birds (similar to the ones in the short film Bird on a Wire). I noticed right away that the birds had very comical expressions - ranging from surprised to angry. I knew more than anything that the expressions I put on my beads would be the biggest challenge when I made them. Also, I had never put eyelids on my beads before (as a result, they all suffer from sever dry eye), so that added to the challenge. The birds posing on the Jenga block are the ones I made for my special order, and I was pretty happy with how they turned out. They got me thinking a lot about expression and how I could improve or expand on the facial features of my beads.

Back when I started making beads, I found a couple tutorials that were instrumental in helping me make critter beads. Super talented Emma Green, from Bead Envy, shares them on her site - one for a penguin and one for a cow head. At the end of the penguin tutorial, she reveals that the most important part of a critter bead is its eyes. "The eyes have it," as she puts it, and I agree completely. By adding eyelids to some of my bird beads, I gave them a more skeptical look. But also, the position of the black eyeball definitely will change the look of a bead from surprised to, say, lonely.

The expression on my penguins is almost always the same - poker faced. They always look as if they don't know what's going on, like, duh, I don't know. I think the position of the wings contributes to this, too, because it looks like he's shrugging his shoulders.

For cow beads, I usually put down a layer of black before I put the white eyeball and then the teal coloring. All these layers take up space on the bead, and as I melt them in they expand, causing the eyes to smush together. For some beads, this is not the effect I want, so I pull off the eyes (don't worry, doesn't hurt a bit) and start over. But for cows, I happen to like how it gives them an almost petrified look. I try to keep the blacks of the eyes closer together and in the middle, and somehow it works.

The sad puppy dog eyes are probably my favorites to make. I start with a layer of black, then white, then a shade of transparent topaz or brown. For these, I try not to let them melt together like on the cows, but I do let them expand a bit. Then I'm careful to put the blacks of the eyes toward the top and also toward the snout. Now he looks like he could use a good scratch behind the ears. Or a cookie.

One look I'm still working on is the sideways glance. I tried it with the kitty on the right, but it seems like only one eyeball got the message. This happens a lot (see the pink bird on the right in the top picture). I need to work on getting those eyeballs in the same spot on each eye. It seems to work when the brown kitty is seated next to the bad fish-eating kitty because he's got something to look at.

I'm going to make it my goal to try to give my beads a little more expression and personality. Let's hope they are cool with that. If not, I guess they'll show me.

Turtlepalooza!

It's Turtlepalooza time! That means all turtles in my Etsy shop have been marked down to $10. You read that right - $10 turtles! I've put them all into my new section called TURTLEPALOOZA, and I'll be adding more throughout the week. Turtlepalooza will run through Sunday, May 22. So grab some turtles at this low price before they run away! Ok, before they slowly slink away.

A turtle for your rope chain.

Gil has special powers - he glows in the dark!

Gil the glow turtle at night.

This is one of my all-time favorite turtles. Its shell is made of fantastic purple murrini (from lori and kim) that's been encased in clear.