When I'm Feeling Uninspired ...

Well, before I explain, a good thing happened. My friend Melanie Gulley owns a new bead store in Avondale Estates, just east of Decatur, GA. It's really one of the only bead stores this far east now that the Stone Mountain store has closed, and so it is exciting to see! She's done a great job with it.

Thursday I dropped by with the cigar boxes in which I keep my beads, and she picked out a lot of beads to carry in her shop. I mean a LOT! My Etsy store went from 96 items to 68 in less than an hour, and she also took several items that weren't listed on Etsy. Now let's hope people buy them! Whether they do or not, it's such a rush having someone like my stuff enough to want to use up some of her shelf space on it. Of course, that AND having people buy them is even better, for both of us. She also wants me to teach some beginning lampwork classes if we can get the space and insurance regulations straightened out. Diane Kovach of DKDesigns, our local Southern Flames co-president, is really excited and is offering a lot of help. (I had asked her to make sure that I wouldn't be cutting into her livelihood, because I have a full time job and she doesn't. But she doesn't really teach in this quarter of the city, so that's good for me!)

What that means, though, is that I suddenly went from having enough inventory to keep the Etsy shop going and to prepare for the three day Down The Street Bead Show in September to having not nearly enough inventory. I know that I can always pull items for the show if they haven't sold, but ... so I was in the enviable position of both having a whole day to torch and the need to crank out a lot of sets.

And, wouldn't you know it, I went brain dead. Even the one custom set I am making to order this week turned out poorly; not one blessed thing from the kiln came out right. So, to quote Lisa Kudrow, I "let it go, let it go!" and started fresh today.
Am taking a break--the kiln's almost full, and we're having a monster thunderstorm, which we needed. I just hope the rain continues in a more gentle way, because this was a true gullywasher, and that will run off rather than filling lakes and aquifers.

But I digress. My online friend Kandice Seeber has a wonderful blog, "Coloraddiction." Every so often she writes about a basic color in one of the main soft glass palettes, and shows how it changes when combined with other colors. Some color combinations I knew about, but others I had had no clue.

So when I am uninspired, I turn to Kandice's latest entry and try that color combo to see what I like. Throughout this post I've pictured some of the beads I've made with her most recent "tried but true" color, light turquoise. To jump start me today I tried frit blends, and will post those tomorrow!