NEW FIRING and Summer SALE!!

Here's a quick pic of what just came out of the kiln.  I just had my sister and 3 nieces here for 5 days.  We had a little marathon glazing.  I'm not sure it was a marathon, but my body and brain were beginning to feel like it was ;o)

My nieces (ages 8-14)  love to make jewelry when they visit and this time wanted to make their own beads to make their own jewelry with....Just like our new website 'Love My Art Jewelry'...creating handmade jewelry with all handmade components! 

Also...I am going to start selling special orders through my own website Artisan Beads Plus along with handmade jewelry.  My very talented son is going to be creating the pendants which I will be glazing.  He will then turn them into simple, but very cool necklace designs.

Hopefully, I will have a little shop up and running soon.  I'm going to offer some favorites with a variety of colors to choose from.  Orders will take 2-3 weeks to depending on my inventory.  I'll post more when it is up and running.  In the meantime, if you are a jewelry designer and you use my beads, send me some pics.  I'd love to add them to my designer gallery. 

~Check out the website for some very cool designs from some incredible designers~

Some New Things to Ponder...

I've been so busy doing the beginning stages of our new "Art Jewelry/Components" website called LoveMyArtJewelry.  If anyone has had the experience of building one, you know how time consuming it can be.  It's worth checking out.  We're making plans for give aways, guest designer pages and more.  Stay tuned....

Just a quick indoor pic of my latest beads.  We just got home from Binghamton.  Bill and I went to MaryAnne's Studio (another MaryAnne) to get free bricks for Bill's Woodfire Kiln.  Came home to a cooled kiln....made a few buttons....Can't do tons of beads when I make buttons.  They often take up the space of two on my bead trees.  Also...not sure about this picture since I took in a cake pan.  Well....I wasn't in the cake pan.  The beads were ;o)  You might want to break out the sunglasses...

Website Building Machine...

Click Picture for Quick Link to New Website

Well....not exactly a machine...but kind of an amatuer, risk-taking, web-building, middle-aged, bead-maker with some basic understanding of things like javascript, meta tags, HTML codes, URL's, content blocks, yada, yada, yada...who thrives on challenges.  Whoah!!  That was long winded!!  As a ceramic bead artist with a brain that pops all over the place, I am always looking for and/or coming up with new ideas....often times taking "old" ideas or ideas that have been there long before me and making them new and different. I'm like that as a teacher too. I guess part of it comes from my strong desire to never grow old and since I can't stop my body from doing that (well, you can stop it a little at your local plastic surgeons office ;o), I look for other ways.

One of those ways is to stay young with my thinking....Working with 12 and 13 year olds certainly helps me to think "young" with the understanding that I don't want to ever think "that young" ever again. Most of us forget those ages because we never want to relive them.  In my teaching careeer, I've commited to never forgetingt that our youth are the future. They were born into world far different than mine and in order to reach them you need to be a part of THEIR world....that's what I mean about thinking young.

Where the heck is this going?? As usual, it's gone off to places that I didn't intend, but, believe it or not, there is a connection. One day while thinking "young" and current, I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be kinda cool to promote handmade jewelry made with all handmade materials....?"

So, as my impulsive personality (I've channeled my that into more productive channels as I've aged) would have it, I started asking some others who I have an online connection with what they thought about the idea. With all the positive feedback that I got.....

... LOVE MY ART JEWELRY... was born!!

The site hasn't been sifted with a fine tooth comb yet, but I think we are off to a good start.  Now I have to figure out why the Search Engine program is telling me I need to fix some things!

Although we don't want this website to get huge and overwhelming, adding other artists in the future is a definite...whether it's in actual pages or Handmade Designer Guest Pages.....Does a good percentage of your handmade jewelry consist of almost all handmade materials? 

Check it out! 

To learn a little more about the artists pictured, I've made some quick links in no particular order....(remember- I just go with it!):

macarroll

julsbeads

mairedodd

mcpeanuts (interview)

missficklemedia

roundrabbit

lynndavis