The beads from the Spiral Bead Swap

Here they are, the fabulous beads I received in the Spiral Bead Swap! Carolyn and Ada's tags were still on so I didn't re-write their names. I wore Charlotte's necklace I made the bail with wire, and I left it on the necklace to scan.
I was really happy with my returns!
I have scanned the charms but yeah, will redo that one as not all the charms were actually on the chain. I need to make jump rings, and it's just one of those little things I haven't gotten around to.

A parent's worse nightmare, this speaks for itself.

Swap Items

These are charms I made for Julie Hetherington's charm swap.

The "beads" below were for a bead swap.



I have my return beads all in one place (just about, I wore a couple already) and I will try to find my charms too and scan them, but the charms are on Julie's blog, so you can look there (and look at her beauties too!)



That's all I have time for at the moment, oh, and just a tin I made, to finish off the post. I have to say I'm really pleased with how it came out. I used some acrylic paint, but something was missing on the tin to match the embellishment (which is made of polymer clay and highlighted with Pearl Ex then edged with a Krylon Leafing pen) so I put some Pearl Ex in some Gum Arabic, and painted that over the acrylic paint. Perfect (to me). Just what I needed. :)

The importance of good lighting!

I use a blob of blu-tak to clean my Krafty Lady moulds before I use them, it removes any dried clay or dust, or "other" which might be in the moulds. I find often some of the air dry clay leaves some residue.

I wanted to make a mix, after a bit of playing (first time in a long time) with gold and silver, it yields a nice colour, so I mix my clay, but find it has a strange consistency, and though it's gold and I know all about Mica shifts, I can't really tell why it's turning whitish and why it feels so funny tonight. My daylight lamp is not turned on as I have only one extra plug, which was being used by my pasta machine, but the colour seems wrong -- I mutter to myself that I should keep better notes on mixes I like... I pull on the clay and it doesn't behave like it normally does, or so I think. I'm a bit tired, I have a cold, and things don't always make sense when you have a cold...

I look around my desk for inspiration as to what to cast, what to make with that weird blob, and think it might look better once baked... though it looks darn strange... and while my eyes were scanning the contents of my desk (which features some gorgeous spiral beads received in a swap earlier today, more on that soon!) I see my blob of silver clay! How can that be, that's the blob I used to mix with gold??? but... where's my Blue Tak blob??? THEN A BULB LIGHT UP!

No wonder it was all looking weird! I had mixed my gold clay with my blu-tak!!!

*sigh*
Thought I'd share as I think it's a pretty funny story!!