When I started lampworking my ambition was to make glass animals and light pulls. Well, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. First of all you make beads because that’s the learning process. After about 500 beads you are starting to get the style and expertise you need to launch into the world of lampworking. Then you start to have lovely ideas and play with those, with varying amounts of success. As the year progresses (and we have the warmest summer for many years) I realised that I had to get on and make my snowmen ready for Christmas. Still no animals. One day I was wandering through various online idea stations and I saw some teddy bears. I thought to myself that their shape is very like that of the snowmen I’d been making. So I experimented and very quickly came up with a formula that seems to work.
The next thing I knew I’d made a whole nursery of them! They vary in shape, as happens and I have explored the rainbow, some glass behaving better than others. But, I am very proud of my nursery. I made a few with tails so they will be keyrings, the others will be available for making into necklaces or just hanging on a ribbon. The problem is that now I have the hang of them I want to make more and more.
I subscribe to a Facebook page for beginner lampworkers and they have a different challenge every month. This month it was colour, or rather, mixing colours. I have had such fun mixing different colours of glass together, some with expected results, some a complete surprise (and a few…..brown!) But we were challenged to put a transparent colour over an opaque colour, so her are my teddy bear results:
I think they’re cute too.
How many teddy bears is too many…….?
Cosy Creative Crafts 