Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Calling All Jewelry Artists!!!

Pin It The Fire Divas are hosting their quarterly jewelry challenge. The theme for this one is The Holiday Season so really anything goes. And we want to help you celebrate. Some of our members have donated very generous prizes, approximately $250 in artisan lampwork beads! Gotta love this group!

Check out the Diva Blog for details. Entries are due no later than 10/15/10 so don't delay! Here's a sneak peak of the fabulous prizes:












Sunday, September 19, 2010

Go Pro With ArtFire for $5.95!!!

Pin It ArtFire is about to exit from their beta status & is offering $5.95 per month memberships to the 1st 20,000 people that sign up. I already have an AF shop, but I've elected to sign up for another one so that I can have 1 be Certified Handmade Artisan, which means that everything in that shop, LAJewelryDesigns, will get the recognition that 100% of the items in that shop is made by hand by me!

The new shop which I just opened, LAJewelryDesignsDestash, will be reserved for destash items from my jewelry making days. One look in my basement will tell you that there's LOTS of destash items coming! But don't delay! Once those 20,000 spots are filled, that's it! ArtFire only announced this new pricing opportunity a few days ago and over 4,000 of them are gone already. Check out their Group Deal for the specifics and to sign up!

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Some More CIM Color Testing

Pin It Jsut 2 more test beads to share today. This is one of my favorite beads to come out of the testing process so far...DH Psyche over Stone Ground Unique.


It seems to have just as much of a reaction as DH Psyche over Canyon De Chelly:

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Glass Color Testing

Pin It I did some color testing for CIM (Creation Is Messy) this week. Love the name of this glass! Makes me giggle! & I love the glass! It melts so smoothly, not runny like a lot of the other 104 COE glass. I was sent a bunch of different glass rods to test. With my upcoming surgery, I only had time to test a few but here are my results so far. Click on the links below to view beads made by other testers as well.

Unique Mermaid - Mermaid Unique base w/stripes of adamantium, over which I layed down psyche & gaia & then swirled them. It seems that the psyche spread out over the admentium completely covering it as it's hardly visible at all. & I was unable to get the DH colors to strike much. I also was a bit surprised to see the red in there on the left. I may have over heated it a bit. I also wanted to note that I really love this color, but it did boil a bit when 1st heated. Then if you heat it a bit more, it all melts in smoothly.

Unique Adamantium - adamantium unique w/DSP shards. I was dissappointed that the silk like quality was lost when melted. Then again, I also melted the shards in all the way so difficult to see the contrast. Adamantium just looks like a med. gray under the shards.

Unique Sepia - Sepia Unique w/DSP shards. It's interesting that the sepia on it's own as a base remained very close to the rod color, maybe a bit more gray whereas in the 2nd bead where it was used over stoneground, it took on more of a pale brown tone.


Unique Butter Pecan - the base I used was butter pecan unique with psyche & gaia over it. it was very hard to get the colors to strike so just looks kind of muddy. I tried to add a swipe of color to the top because it needed more glass there, but I picked up the adamentium by mistake which is why you see the gray, while the rest of the base looks more ivory.