Handblown Shells

I was recently inspired by the spring marine & aquatic issue of The Flow Magazine. There was an amazing photo of some shells made by Vittorio Costantini and I decided to make a few shells of my own. I was only planning to make a few but then I got hooked on making them :)

Jason

Decorating

We found a sweet computer desk by the dumpster recently and decorated it with some of my paperweights.

Thanks for looking!

Jason

More Paperweights

I can't keep away from making more paperweights! More coming soon :)

 

 

Jason

Turtles

I've started working on a new series of turtle sculpture beads. Eventually I'll start working on other sea creatures like jellyfish, octopus and fish.

Turtle Family. This one is one of my favorites, there is an adult turtle and two baby turtles.

 **SOLD**

 Albino Turtle

Thanks for looking!

Jason

Some Garden Photography

It's such a lovely day today! :) It was nice and cool at the New Boston Farmer's Market this morning and in the afternoon I decided to have some fun taking some photos of the garden. I've always been drawn to macro photography, so that's mostly what I'll be showing. I took these photos using a canon g10 powershot. It's not as bulky as my Nikon D70s and has a ton of manual modes which I love.


























































The last shot is pretty cheesy, but I still love it. I set the self timer on the camera, tossed it in a flower pot and ran across the yard, haha :)











Andrea

Flower Pairs

Yesterday I worked on more flowers and made 9 pairs. I tried a few different layouts for the flowers and was happy with the outcome of all of them. I still have more ideas for pairs but it is quite cold out so not torching today. We will start listing them tonight on Etsy most likely :)

Flowers

The other day I was thinking of what would be new/good for farmer's markets for this summer and thought of the flower pendant I did the other day. I decided to make focals instead of pendants and had quite a bit of fun making them! The one in the first picture was challenging since the flowers are in different directions so it was hard to lay down the flowers. I've made seven so far and definitely going to make a lot more :) Next ones I'll try adding flowers, grapes and other stuff to the focal.

Demo and Kobuki

Last Friday I did my first demo, it was with Marta's class. It was a snowflake/star bead demo, I saw a lot of the ones the students were making and they were amazing :)

I left before open torch that day to head up to the hotel in Maine for Kobuki's class. His class is amazing and if anyone has a chance to take his class I'd highly recommend it if you enjoy making either pendants or marbles. I got to see five demos, he did one I missed the night we headed back, four of them were flowers and one was the jellyfish I have been wanting to see really bad! This week I have been making so many marbles! Most of them are actually coming out decent. I tried two jellyfish yesterday, first one came out alright but I fixed my mistakes one the second one but it cracked! Not completely sure why it cracked but it still went into the kiln and will be part of my collection :) Here's a picture of the first marble I made after getting back from the class, really happy with it :)














Not sure if I posted before but we got a new car finally, it is a 2002 Ford Focus. The car is really fun to drive. It is a standard though so getting used to driving one since never really drove a standard around.

Farmer's Market Video

Teacher's Assistant!

I have been talking back and forth with the director of education at Sharon Arts Center and I had an interview with her yesterday about being a teacher's assistant, and possibly teaching in the future. The interview went well and starting tomorrow and continuing on Fridays till 11/6 I will be Marta Bernbaum's assistant!!!! Her beautiful work can be seen here. I am very excited at this amazing opportunity :) While being an assistant I will earn "Learn and earn" time which for every two hours I volunteer for I earn one hour towards a class!

I also signed up this morning for John Kobuki's marble making class for 24/25 of this month! Also very excited about how much my marble/pendant skills will improve after that!

Adventuring into Polymer Clay

We were at Henniker Riverside Artisans shop yesterday to place some of our work on consignment and the owner had some polymer clay beads that were really neat. Today we ended up buying a small sampling selection, hopefully it will be here by sometime in the week :) I'll post plenty of pictures of the cane and whatever else we end up making :) Ultra excited to try something new :)

I switched our website over to a new host and been working on it a little bit. So far I like the layout better, just have to work quite a bit on the Zen-cart part of the site.

Anywho, here is some murrini getting listed on Etsy tonight by Andrea.

More Murrini!

Here's the first batch listed on Etsy :) Pictures show murrini on test beads

Murrini!

I made a 7 point optic mold the other day and Andrea has been working on some 104 coe murrini. Here is some of the ones from the first few days, they keep getting better! Will have some listed on Etsy within the next few days :)

Flower Sculpture

I've been getting some really good torching days going the past few days. Boro sculptures one day, 25 boro buttons (felt like I was going to go insane after that many) the next and yesterday made some soft glass beads. Always strange to go back to soft glass after only doing a few beads everyone once in a while with it. Probably more soft glass as I wait for my order of boro clear to come in on Thursday.

Here's one of the scultures from Saturday :)

Monsters and Dreamcatcher

I finally came up with some feather designs out of boro that I like for dreamcatchers and made several yesterday. Ended up needing one more of two different colors to finish up two dreamcatchers. Probably post those finished or unfinished either tomorrow or Monday.

Finished up my resume for Sharon Arts Center and having Andrea's sister proofread it while I work on portfolio. Also worked on class descriptions for a few classes; pendants, buttons, paperweights and beads. Really hoping I can teach there this winter semester, January and February :)

Here is some of my monsters from last month. Going to start working on some more again this week :)

Monster with candle, mom with egg, beholder and tripod kitty

Future studio?

We have been looking in our area to possibly move our studio into a new location, outside of the house. So far we have found three locations that interest us; Concord, Nashua, and Wilton. Concord however is a fifty minute ride each way so that is our last choice at the moment. Our favorite would be the artist mills in Wilton.

We want to move our studio so the public can wander into the studio, watch us work, also maybe have a little gallery section. Hopefully eventually set up some extra torches and teach some beginner classes, both soft glass and borosilicate. We would also try to stock up on some supplies so we can sell starter packs, tools, and supplies to people locally. If it picks up then we would try to order more in bulk so we can start to sell supplies online too again.

At the beginning we would probably just do private lessons since we already have the second torch and extra tools :)

We are going to contact a few local places to see if they would be interested in having me teach a beginning boro class sometime soon since there has been a lot of people asking lately. Not completely sure what subject I would teach yet, I enjoy off mandrel work the most so that would be my first choice :)

Here is a set Andrea made yesterday, picture taken by cellphone

New booth setup :)

Here's some pictures of the new booth setup we had for maybe a month now :) Much easier to setup and the wind doesn't take away the displays :P

Been sick the past little while so haven't got much torching done lately but here is the pendants I forgot to post. I've mainly been working on a few guardian monsters, also some new monster designs, and lots of focal beads. We started listing on ebay again, getting some old stuff off our website, etsy and artfire. We will probably start listing every day like we did before :)