Wednesday Worktable

Happy July 4th!

I can't believe it is already 7:30 PM! The bead shop was closed today, so I decided to take advantage of that, and transform the classroom into my enamel studio again. I really have to have a day without interruptions in order to enamel with the torch.

I arrived at the shop at 10AM, and started clearing off the table in the classroom while the computer was booting up. I needed to print off the 50% off coupon for Michael's, and dash over there for one tube of bugle beads - shhhh...don't tell anyone the bead shop owner went to Michael's to buy beads!

Naturally, after I found the bead section (I've shopped at Michael's before for scrapbooking stuff, but I have never shopped there for beads! Really!) I stepped into the aisle, and ran smack into one of my customers from the bead shop. Of course, I accused her of cheating on me, and she then proceeds to ask ME for help making her beading purchases from Michael's. Geeeesh.

After I finished helping her, I went off in search of the bugle beads (which I no longer carry at the bead shop). I purchased this beautiful tutorial from Smadar a few weeks ago, and it calls for 6g of bugles. Michael's doesn't carry bugles, either, so I went across the street to Hobby Lobby (no coupon, boo!), got my bugles, and arrived back at the bead shop at 10:45. {The Smadar tutorial is next on my project list - but not for today.}

By 11:30 I was all set up and ready to enamel:

My plan was to play with mixing colors, and also to get enough beads made to do some projects with them, and hopefully have a few left over to sell.

My enamel selection is a little dizzying, and a little sick:

I set 40 of them on the table - and this isn't even ALL of them. Crazy.

Then I chose the ones I really wanted to work with, which amounted to about 22 different colors, and put the rest away so I'd have a little room. And then I fired up the torch. And torched, and torched, and torched, and before I knew it, it was 7:05!

I always bite off more than I can chew when I set aside an enamel day. By 3 PM, I had stopped doing sets of beads in each color, and was just doing 2-3 beads with each color just to see how the colors turned out., I'll file the test beads away with the color labelled, and then I can come back to them and make more as needed.

I managed to make it through about 25 different color combos (sometimes combining 2 or more colors to get a different color altogether). Some of the colors turned out great, others, just so-so.

Here is today's bead turn out:

It's about 135 beads. Seems like I should be able to get a lot more done in 8 hours, but what with changing colors, and mixing colors, it always takes much longer than I think it will.

That's it for today's worktable. Stay tuned tomorrow for the big surprise!