Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Vague


 

 
When Neil collects his sea glass there are sometimes pieces of glass that you cannot tell what they were before. And in addition to the glass he’s found pieces from pottery and crockery. He did some research and discovered from the manufacturer’s mark that one piece is from a plate dating back to the 70’s. Again you can check out his collection of sea glass on his blog. I tried very hard not to make any blue earring for this collection but I just couldn’t help it.
 
I wore this pair to church last week and I received so many compliments on them. They probably are my favorite of all the designs in this collection but honestly I don’t know what this would be if it were sea glass. It’s too blue to be a Coca-Cola bottle and too light to be a poison bottle. I suppose it would just be a random piece of glass that could have come from housewares that were discarded and made it into a drain leading to the ocean, traveled the currents and landed on a shore somewhere.
 
The light blue glass is wrapped in non-tarnish silver-plated copper wire and fitted on silver-plated kidney wires. They hang just under an inch from the ear.
£4.50 including UK shipping, $8.65 including US shipping.

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Wine Bottles


Wine bottles

 



This won’t be a long post partly because it’s so late and partly because the main story I told last week.

This pair is made of green glass that if it were sea glass it would probably have been wine bottles in a previous life. This pair is rather small, they hang just under an inch from the ear. As always the findings are silver-plated and the glass is wrapped in non-tarnish silver-plated copper wire.

£4.00 including UK shipping, $8.00 including US shipping

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Sea Glass - Coca-Cola

Sea Glass

I had an idea sitting at breakfast Saturday morning. My husband has collected sea glass from the beach for years possibly decades. He has quite a nice little collection of pieces of glass in various colors; you can check out one of his posts on the collection on his blog. He can date some of the glass pieces by their color. You can tell what some things are from the color. Green is wine, brown is beer, clear could be an old medicine bottle or a modern day liquor bottle, light blue glass could be old Coca-Cola bottles dating back to the 1920’s and dark blue was used for poison so if you find dark blue glass it could date back to the 1950’s.
So I asked him if he has any sea glass that he could spare. He thought about it and said that all the glass he had was sentimental picked from Cornwall or our trip from the Isle of Wight. Then I remembered I have all the lovely glass beads and some of them are frosted like Neil’s sea glass.

Well, it was frosted when I started working with them, but once my fingers ran around the beads with the wire they were a bit shinier.  I made several pairs in different colors, shapes and patterns. I tried to imitate the glass in Neil’s collection. I decided to release them by color and I made it a point not to use and blue glass since I’ve released a lot of it recently.
I think this color glass would be Coca-Cola bottles. I love this color bead; they’re clear but have a slight blue tint to them. Two pair are oval shaped and are wrapped one time with wire. The third pair are shaped slightly like barrels an even have ridges although the ridges run horizontally (parallel with the wire) not vertically. The barrel pair is wrapped three times with wire.
The beads are all glass, the wire is all non-tarnish silver plated copper and the ear fittings are silver plated as well. The barrel shaped pair hangs an inch and an eighth, the larger ovals (middle pair) hang three quarters of an inch and the smaller ovals hang exactly an inch.
£4.50 including UK shipping, $8.55 including US shipping.
 

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Azure

Azure



I hope you enjoyed your 4th of July (if you celebrate it), we had a pretty good day too. Even though I’m not in the US anymore I have celebrated the holiday every year I’ve been here. The first year one of my friends from University had all the Americans over; she cooked and we just sat around talking all evening.  The next year Neil and I actually had a BBQ; shish kebabs, potato salad, deviled eggs, grilled corn on the cob, sangria and watermelon for dessert. That year was the best! Last year was right after the wedding and my mom was still here so we just had burgers and maybe potato salad. But this year I wanted a BBQ again, only extenuating circumstances prevented us from getting the grill out so I made everything in the kitchen. I made potato and pasta salad the day before along with some minty simple syrup for the mojitos. So yesterday all I had to do was make the deviled eggs and cook the hot dogs and burgers (all veggie). It was great! During the day (between meals) Neil watched the Tour de France and I watched American movies and TV shows on Netflix.

 
This is the last of the designs I made several weeks ago. I love the dark blue glass of these. Again, none of the bead heads were small enough to top these beads. And since these beads are flat they probably wouldn’t look right anyway. The beads hang from a short length of chain, which of course I can make as long or short for you as you’d like (or take it away all together if you’d like); that’s the advantage of handmade jewelry.

 
Each dark blue (somewhere between Navy and Royal) glass bead is half an inch long. As usual all the findings and the chain are silver plated, and the earrings can be fitted with either fish hooks, kidney wires (shown) or clip-ons (at an additional cost). Each earring will hang an inch and a third from the ear.
Well, now I need to get back to work since I no longer have a backlog to publish from. I have a few ideas in my head but they need to be worked out, which is the fun part but it’s just finding the time to play around.
 

£4.00 including UK shipping, $7.95 including US shipping. One pair left