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Once a month, I attend the Anglian Bead Group in Colchester. It's a seed bead group but I went because I think some of the techniques are useful for my lampwork beads, particularly if I make some lampies up into jewellery. Last meeting, we were discussing what project to do for the next session and someone suggested a cabochon beading tutorial as one of the members had brought in a malachite type pendant with green seed beads made from a kit bought from Pandorion.

I bought some curved mandrels from Zooziss and this is the second bead I've made with a curve. It's not very long as I was a bit hesitant to use the full length of the curve in case I couldn't get the bead off after annealing. It's recommended that you use Foster Fire Smooth and Tough bead release with these mandrels as obviously it's impossible to twist the bead to get it off the mandrel. After soaking overnight, the bead came off the mandrel reasonably easily.

Spring has sprung and I've made a few flowers with my new press.
Five Flowers
I intend to make a set of the same colour and intersperse the flowers with glass leaves. These flowers were just to see how the new press behaved. I bought the press from Spheres of Glass
Some of the Canada Geese on Canvey Lake have started nesting,Nesting Goose

Every so often, I decide to make a hollow bead. Kat will know how I agonised over these at Christmas. Here are the two latest ones,
Spotted hollow
There has been some improvement since then.
Filigrana hollow

I saw a simple necklace at page 30 of the Beaded Treasures book I mentioned previously and wanted to try one out. I wanted a very simple design so made a hollow central bead and smaller beads to keep it company. I wasn't sure how to finish the fastening but saw some tag shaped beads elsewhere and thought I might make one to fit through the loop previously made.
Here's the finished article and I like its simplicity.
Blue beaded treasure necklace
The next picture shows the thread going through the hollow bead,

Here's a totally different bracelet to the last one. The pattern is a modification of a pattern in Beadwork Magazine, February/March, Volume 11 Number 2 page 34. It was the latest project of the Anglian Bead Group which I attend once a month in Colchester.
Crystal Bracelet
I thought I ought to get it finished as we are due to start another project next Wednesday night.

I mentioned the finger weaving technique in my post called Nancy the Cat. Here's a picture of my first effort using mint colour C Lon thread and mostly chunky beads. The look becomes completely different if mostly smaller beads are used.
Chunky Bracelette
I might add some smaller beads to the loop and parts of the weave that show too much.

I keep all my photos an external hard drive which is set up as a mirrored RAID with two 400GB hard drives. I've been noticing that it's been making a lot of noise recently and not turning itself off properly when the computer it connects to shuts down so I've sort of been expecting it to start dieing soon. Yesterday was the first day that it struggled to connect properly to the computer once it had power taking around half an hour with fiddling and turing it on and off to get Windows to recognise it as a drive.

I recently bought the book "Beaded Treasures" by Robin Atkins. It gives instructions for Finger woven bracelets, Necklaces, Tassels and Straps. Not having any of the items listed in the "Supplies" section on page 3, I of course decided to go ahead with what I had despite the fact that none of it matched the list. Instead of the cork board, I used an old cork notice board. For the T pins I used push pins. For the Fray Check I used nail varnish and lastly for the C.Lon cord I used some crappy yellow cottony thread.

This vessel is in green soft glass. When I first started this vessel, I annealed it in vermiculite and found extensive cracks when I took it out. I kept it on the mandrel and put it into a cold kiln to see if I could reheat and heal the cracks. I brought the kiln up to 537 degrees centigrade, took out the mandrel and reworked the vessel plus tinkered with the handles and added the darker green blobs.Soft glass vessel