Pendant and necklace with Dorry beads
I bought these beads from Dorry at the last hobby fair in April.
This is what I made of the first and the last ones.
The one in the middle still waits for inspiration to strike 
Frog and toad beads
I wanted to further practice modeling glass and so I made these beads with frogs last week.
The first one is a frog on a hollow bead decorated with blue stringers in a wave pattern:
By the time I finished it my propane bottle was quite empty and the flame wouldn’t go beyond a soft hiss. Nonetheless, I was just able to finish the following little fellow in the same session before it ran out completely:
Since I melted in some transparent dots on its back I call it a toad. The orange dots on the red base bead don’t show well, only at a certain angle and weren’t captured in this picture.
Since I note down the colors I use for every bead I am now certain that one bottle of propane on a Hot Head torch goes a long way: 299 beads exactly, most medium sized, no really fast and simple beads. This first bottle took me through 11 months of lampworking… the second is already in use and you’ll see the first results in a few days.
Glassy fibula
I needed a clasp for a vest I knitted. Unfortunately I had placed the buttonholes where the pattern told me to… It looked very strange that way when worn. So I needed to button the vest where there is no buttonhole. The dear Schnugis helped me solve this problem: what I needed was a clasp or a pin of some kind. That reminded me of the fibulas in the “Bead on wire” book by Sharilyn Miller which I had never tried out, thinking I would not have a use for them. Now I had.
So this is my first fibula, but probably not the last –> different cardigans and shawl call for different colors of fibulas 
and it is a nice way to use small single glass beads.
Inspired by nature
These tulips grow in our garden:
After I had looked at them for some time, I decided I had to make a tulip-bead in those colors. As I didn’t have such a soft taint of yellow, it was the perfect occasion to mix my own glass color 
.
The first attempt looks like this.
I still got some leftover of the yellow glass and I want to try it once more… there’s still much room for improvement.
Jump ring earrings
This afternoon was to stormy to sit at my torch. The torch flame was thrown left and right as the wind snatched at it. So after one bead for my current “oriental” project I decided to stop. But since I still felt quite creative, I took up my newly bought seed beads, jump rings and pliers and made the earrings I had imagined yesterday night.
They are made with 6mm jump rings and 6/0 and 8/0 sized Toho seed beads.
Coppergreen
Well? Where’s the green you ask?
It’s right there… those lines on the bigger lentilbeads of the bracelet and the the green-turquoise looking strikes on the Pandora style bead were made with the same color: coppergreen. I like it’s properties. The black lentil bead of the bracelet was the first one I made using that glass and it was not what I expected at all. I had heated the bead too much and the color was “burned” to this rough metallic look. The look of this combined to the smooth black base of the bead I was immediately in love with the style.
So there were more…the ivorybased lentil and the dark red one… and the three of these, together with some jumprings, a bit of ready-made chain and some smaller bought beads were turned into a bracelet.
Froggy
With Corinna Tettinger’s tutorial on the desk beside my torch I made my first frog a few days ago. Pure adrenaline 
So much could go wrong. I would get the toes and fingers wrong, the body would clump up into a ball of glass, I wouldn’t be able to attach the arms, the the whole frog might sink into a too hot bead… and even if it all went well (and it more or less did) and the frog would, by sheer miracle, not be cross-eyed, there was still the cooling that might crack the bead and all my work on it in vermiculit.I don’t have a temper over where the tensions inside the glass could even out over a whole night so this little creature would have to dip it’s head into the warmed vermiculit bed and cool a bit faster.
It all went well… the next day, I got the frog out of its cooling bed, not cracked, I took a picture… just to be on the sure side. I cleaned the hole, still no cracking, I wired it to form a pendant and still it stayed whole. I wore it for half a day before part of a finger chipped off, but it’s still wearable and lovely (if I might say so myself of my own bead 
)
Winterbeads
This winter I wasn’t able to sit many hours at the torch. Either the window overhead was snown in or it rained or it was simply freezing cold. But here you may see most of the beads I made in those harsh conditions
Simply click on the pictures below to get a larger slideshow:
Cowl and mitts
I just noticed that I haven’t shown you my last finished project yet. A whip cowl made from wonderful Araucania Lauca. The pattern is available for free here and on Ravelry.
I didn’t have anything to keep my head warm in winter, well not that I would have needed it all though December… but January brought freezing temperatures and for every 10 minutes walk at -13°C, I was glad I’d knitted this cozy cowl.
Why I never had a hat? I don’t have a “hat-friendly” face… I look as if I was ready to go for 400m breast-swimming in each and every hat I try on. So I was happy when a Schnugi-friend posted the picture of her cowl. That gave me the idea, that maybe such a type of hat would suit me better. Indeed, it does. The pattern I chose is very easy to pick up, but when the wind blows hard enough it manages to creep through those little holes…
By the time my cowl had the correct length I was left with half a skein of this wonderful fast-knitting wool. And I had wanted to knit myself mitts for some months now… 
It really isn’t all that difficult. I combined 2 patterns, but I’m not really happy about the thumb-hole. It’s too large and the cold gets in in this place. Also, they could cover the fingers way more. But that’s not the fault of the pattern… it’s due to the skein finally coming to it’s end
Some new beads
I had no particular project in mind when I tried out those new combinations, but some of the (especially the turqoise-green ) colors I like so much, that I will try to make some more beads to form either a bracelet or a necklace.
one of this color combination didn't make it
but the second one did...
my son seems to have a crush on the right one of the beads above… he wants to wear it in a necklace. That wish can be granted
