So, yeah. Five years since I blogged and at least three years since I melted glass. A lot has changed. In those three years, we sold our house and moved to a much smaller place so my glass studio was packed up and put into storage.

Fast forward to now and my soul has nearly shriveled to nothing since I haven’t fed my creative side in so long. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done creative stuff, but not with glass which is my absolute favorite thing to do.

After whining for about a week, my husband, Eric, finally said, “Let’s get the stuff out of storage.” My soul inflated just a little. It’s been almost a week since my stuff was retrieved and it will be another few weeks before I can actually fire up my torch.  There are some logistically difficult hurdles to overcome. For one thing, we now have a one-car garage instead of the two-car one we had at the house.  Squeezing in amongst the full shelves of tools and miscellanies is the easy part.

The more difficult task is to make my setup more mobile and less permanent because hubby still wants to be able to do his woodworking on occasion. We’ve both had to make some compromises to make this work.

The tl:dr is this; I will be melting glass soon.  My soul is looking forward to being full again.

My week off has been spent productively, I think.  I mean, for someone who hasn’t actually changed out of pajama’s, I’ve gotten a lot done.  I’ve planted a ton of seeds and cared for all of my animals… Of course, that’s all in my virtual game world.  My real world has been less productive, though the torching is going pretty well.

I actually made a mini set yesterday and all the beads look decent.

There was another test bead, an encased floral, I made with this same background color, but my year hiatus made me forget that this glass doesn’t like to be encased and… well… it’s getting a watery grave in the bottom of my quench bowl.

I’m really going to work  on keeping a balance between my gaming and crafting because I don’t want to burn out on either one.  So, here’s my first attempt at melding the two things.  Oh, yeah, there are things I could do better on this, but it’s a starting point.

Special shout out to my guildie and new cheerleader, Kristian/Shira. 🙂 Thanks for the encouragement.

**Need to get the photo stuff out so these look less pitiful than they really are.

I did it!  I lit my torch for the first time in about 14 months. And I actually made beads. They aren’t great.  I won’t be posting them for sale on Etsy or Facebook, but they may one day make it to the bead orphan bowl… The bowl with functionally competent beads that were one-offs from one of my torching sessions.

I’m super rusty, which I guess is to be expected.  I suppose it could have been worse.  I filled a couple presses like a boss, but when it came time to decorate those bases… Well, that’s were it all fell apart. Witness the sad bunny…

I have a few more beads in the kiln right now and sadly, not much progress was made.  But, I’ll keep at it. If nothing else, I did remember how much I love to melt glass.

It’s been soooooo long since I’ve done anything crafty, but that all ends today.  First step was getting my blog back up and running.  Check.  Second step, getting my glass desk cleaned off… check!  I also spent an hour of my life working on my bead release.  Bead release is the bane of my lamp working life.  I hate putting it on and I hate taking it off.

But, I did it so today, I fire up the torch.  It’s been over a year, so who knows what’s going to come out.  Baby steps. 🙂

Man, does time fly.  I just realized that it’s been over a month since my last post, and really, we haven’t done much.  We did participate in the Old City Association Home Tour Street Fair and we had a great time.  We had wonderful weather and despite the fact that there weren’t a lot of shoppers, we managed to do very well.  In fact, since the booth rental was free, we had our most successful show ever.  Honestly, we couldn’t have done it without our friends and family who come out to support us.  It gives me a warm fuzzy when I think about it.

We did sign up for a holiday show at a local senior community.  I know these aren’t terribly profitable, but it sounded like fun and since the booth rate is reasonable, we decided to go ahead.  This will be my husband’s first show under his new “Woodworking by Eric” moniker.  He’s got business cards and everything.  Oh, and he’s recently opened his own Etsy shop (www.woodworkingbyeric.etsy.com).

He better stay that way. I really don’t want to have to order new cards.

I really need to get crackin’ on holiday beads now.  Seems horrible to say that when we’re still a few weeks out of Halloween, but I think that the senior community might be a good market for them.   I say that, but I really don’t have a clue.  I thought that the home show tour would be a good market for the tile coasters we make…  Not so much.  Didn’t manage to sell even one set.  Meh.  Maybe we’ll have better luck at the senior community.

Oooh. Ah… You know you want them. Pfft.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to.  I am going to post one more picture of something I’ve been working on because I’m happy with the way it turned out…