Wonderful weekend!

This weekend my friend Debbie and I went on a course to learn how to make beautiful beads and fantastic jewelery. It was a very intensive and informative weekend and I would love to be able to do it all over again.

We went to Malvern setting off at 6am Saturday morning. We arrived for business around 9am and got down to it at 10am with a cup of tea and an introduction to the Lusherie and equipment.

Deb and I watched the demos and got stuck in. The torches were different to any that we had ever used before, we have hot heads which are extremely loud and extremely slow. Its hard to melt enough glass to actually make many beads with any size.  So after the safety instructions we started. It was great to be able to melt glass quickly and to learn techniques which we had been struggling with for ages. We spent the whole day making lots of lovely beads. 

In the evening we went out for dinner with Julie our instructor, her daughter and Jo the other lady on the course. Julie had provided a lovely lunch but we were ready for dinner!

The next morning we went back to check out the kilns and see what we had produced....

We were thrilled with our haul of beads we had managed to produce a heart a pond bead (although mine was more swamp than pond!!) We had to make some little beads which I had huge problems with, I simply found them too hard to do, It was like rubbing your tummy and patting your head. The glass melted quickly and I kept losing the beads off the mandrel dropped them onto the table!! Debbie managed to turn her torch into a flame thrower !! She lit it and produced a 3 foot long flame which gave us a fit of the giggles, we took ages to settle down after that one. I then went onto dropping a blob of glass onto the torch blocking one of the nozzles (eek!!) I was mortified but Julie was very nice about it all, obviously cursing the day she agreed to let us darken her doorstep!!!

On Sunday morning we arrived back at Julies after a night in our B and B and a great breakfast. We were introduced to our next instructor George, she had arrived to teach us all how to transform our beads into wearable jewelery all with the use of some copper wire, a hammer and assorted pairs of pliers!

I am so pleased with the results we made all the metal work, all the clasps, all the little coils and the beads!! 

This is possibly the biggest bead I have ever made !! 

Possibly the biggest surprise of the day is the bead above which we made into a ring. It looks great on and its definitely something I would make again.

So if you are considering doing some glassy courses try out this course available here at By George, its Lush

I would recommend the hospitality of Julie, her encouragement and unflappability. George got us all making fantastic creations with ease and a total expectation that we would succeed (I wasn't certain that I would!!)

Thank You both for a great weekend, I hope to do it again sometime soon!!