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I am a member of a Forum for mostly British Lampworkers, i.e. people who make handmade glass beads with a propane torch and oxygen. We sometimes have swaps, a bit like the Secret Santa swaps held at Christmas. We are now having a fishy bead swap with some of us buying an E Tutorial by Cathy Lybarger of Aardvarkartglass. You can find her Etsy store here
and my pictures of the fish I've made so far are below

I got the book "Woven Wire Jewelry" by Linda L. Chandler and Christine R. Ritchey from the Library and finally plucked up the courage to try the practice piece, in copper wire in case it all went horribly wrong. Here's the piece. It's about 5.5 inches so too short as it is for a bracelet. I might try adding something to turn it into one.

Here's one I did today using CIM Sangria glass. I've threaded 4 strands of copper wire through the bead hole and twisted then to form a stem.

I love flowers and try to capture one in glass every so often.

the only one posting and reading the site this week?

Kat, I was going to embarrass you by posting one of your baby pictures, but thought better of it. Forgot to send you a card but hope the extra prezzie arrived safely. See, now everyone knows its your birthday. I expect you were trying to keep it quiet.

As you may have noticed, I've been doing a bit of chain maille recently and have been trying different types. I was told that Jens Pind was simple but it seems like it's taken me forever to get this necklace done. I think the difficulty was that I was advised by someone with a lot more experience than me to try a slightly smaller copper jump ring. Next time, I'll go by what my book says and use 1 mm copper wire wound on a 3 mm mandrel for the jump rings. The beads i made ages ago and thought the copper would go well with them. The toggle hoop and bar are handmade too.

I'm practicing faces and this is the latest. She's 40mm high.

and I did another "Chaos" bead last night to keep my hand in.

Time for something new. I've recently become interested in maille work to be used in jewellery. That is, joining jump rings together to make either chains or flat pieces in different patterns. The Wikipaedia definition of chainmaille can be found at Wikipedia
and there are various sites with very good tutorials. A guide to these can be found at Blue Buddha Boutique.

I made these before going to Morrisons for shopping this morning.

I'm only just posting as I visited Dizzy Di at her Studio in Wat Tyler Country Park for a few hours. We swopped tips and she tried out my silver bead corer bought from Dave at artintheround in America.