My Studio - Part 4

If you haven't read parts 1, 2, or 3, you're going to be pretty lost. You can go back and start with part 1 here. At the end of part 3, I just tucked myself in for a long winter's nap. You can read what happened next by reading on below.

I did a lot of reading that winter. The more I read about ventilation and safety the more I realized I was not in a safe torch environment. We bought three box fans to help circulate the air, and I bought a respirator. It wasn't a solution, but it helped. We talked about setting up a studio. We would have to buy a building and customize it to meet my needs. The problem was, we were trying to sell our house. It didn't make sense to spend all that money on a studio when we were going to be moving. We put the house on the market before our third was born, but it didn't sell, so we took it off right before she was born. After a few months we put the house back on the market, and then off again because school had started, and then on again, and off again... You get the idea.

The winters were getting to me. Last winter I had to stop lampworking in November and couldn't start again until mid-April because it was so cold. I'd had enough. I decided there was no point in waiting. We haven't sold the house and had no idea if we ever would. I was working in unsafe conditions, I couldn't see the frit, shards, or other fun things I had to use in my beads because it was all stacked in piles, and I couldn't use any of my 175lbs of glass because it was piled into plastic storage containers. I was working with shorts, and that was on the few occasions I could even work at all. I gave my every hour to my family. I took care of everything when my husband went out of town every week. I couldn't even go to the bathroom alone. I had no time for me. It had to stop.

Two weeks later we started building my studio.

We bought a building kit from Home Depot and my dad put it together with his helper. They did a lot of extra reinforcing to make it super sturdy.

The floor framing:

Back wall is up:

Sides are up, and roof framing is done:
Shingled!

My ventilation system in the works. It's a furnace fan given to me for free by my Heating & Air neighbor:


Outside view:

The fan boxed in to create stronger suction:


The walls are insulted and paneled to keep me toasty in the winter. Panels going up:


The studio construction continues in part 5!

Fabulous Friday Weekly Promo Sale!

This week's item is only going to be on sale until Wednesday evening. That's because my wonderful husband and I are leaving Thursday for a week-long celebration of our 10th anniversary!! We're going to be spending some time on the beach, so in honor of our trip, I've chosen this bead for the Weekly Promo Sale:

Beach's Bounty in Green

You can buy this incredible sculpted shell at Artfire or Etsy for 15% off - only $12.75. Don't forget to type FFWPS in the comments box to get your refund!

My Studio - Part 3

If you haven't read parts 1 & 2, please start by reading part 1 here. When I left off, I'd just had our first child and had turned to beading to help keep busy. The story continues below.

Almost exactly two and a half years after our daughter, we had a son.

Johnathan

He was tiring! He didn't want to sleep through the night for the longest time. I'm not a "lack of sleep" person - I need my rest! I decided, although I rarely spent the money, that I deserved to treat myself to some beads from my local bead shop. I was looking around and stopped dead in my tracks when I saws a sign for an introduction to lampworking class! I immediately asked the price and then I signed up. She didn't know when they would hold the class; apparently I was the only one interested and the teacher couldn't hold a class for one student. They needed three. She told me to keep checking in.

I called every week. No one signed up. Finally, she told me she had someone else interested in the class, and they set a date. Then the date was postponed. Ahh!! When the day finally arrived I was beyond myself with nerves and excitement. The bead shop owner introduced me to the other student - it was her daughter. She explained that she knew how badly I wanted to take the class, so she signed her daughter up and asked the teacher to hold the class for the two of us. I'm still thankful.

With a flick of the hand the hot head roared to life. The moment I put the glass in the flame, everything in my life came together. I knew why I had struggled. I knew why nothing seemed to fit. I knew why my life had taken the course that it had. I knew what I was meant to do, and I walked out of that half-day class with a hot head kit and a feeling of completion.

Now to set up a work area! We had no idea what we were doing! It's amazing how many times my husband and I have just flown by the seat of our pants yet everything turned out ok. We bought a card table and cut some plywood to fit. Then we screwed a clamp onto it and attached my hot head to the plywood. I ordered a bulk propane hose and we stole the bbq tank off our rusted grill and hooked it up. We set this all up in the doorway of the garage, and I had a fiber blanket beside me. I splurged and spent $100 on single rods of glass in basic colors. I promised my husband that it was just that much money at first, and after that I could just replace what I used, which would be very little. Ahhh, how blissful ignorance really is (she says, thousands of dollars later!).

My first beads were so tiny! The first "focal" I made was a whopping 1/2". We couldn't believe how big it was! My spacers were about 2-3mm on average. I would lampwork on Saturday and Sunday for an hour and a half (I still had to nurse my son every two hours!). Once I had about 30 beads I took them to be annealed.

I had about two months of lampwork time before I got pregnant with our third child. It was difficult not being able to lampwork. In the meantime I was saving every penny of my birthday and holiday money to buy my own kiln, and I achieved that goal. Then I upgraded my torch to a bobcat, and bought an oxygen concentrator. Then I started buying other things. I bought tools, frit, and all kinds of things to help me expand my ability. If my husband said anything to me, I would remind him that I was very pregnant and unable to lampwork, or even breathe in peace. Buying glassy stuff was the only way for me to feel connected to the torch at a time when I couldn't fire it up. He didn't say much. He's a pretty smart guy!

Jasmine

By the time our third beautiful child, a girl, was born, I had gathered quite a bit of yummy glassy goodness! I was, however, still working in the doorway of the garage. I had about two months of lampwork time after I had recovered from my third c-section before it got too cold. The garage was freezing and I'm cold-natured. I had to wait three long months before I would lampwork again.

Part 4 is here.

My Studio - Part 2

If you haven't read part one, please do so here. Where we left off, I had just met my husband. I continue below.

My husband knew my chosen career path was hopeless. I'd have to take both my beginning chemistry classes over again to raise the grade to even have a chance at graduating. We both knew that even students with a 4.0 gpa were rejected from vet school. There was also the little issue that I'd grown to hate the idea of it.

He knew I loved computers, and I was very good at it. I'd taught myself enough HTML to put together a dinky little web page in a time when all you had to work with was basic HTML and notepad. He suggested I change my major and I was thrilled with the idea. I did just that and loved the classes.

I didn't continue with it, though. I was a great programmer. My teachers were thrilled with my work and reassured me I would have an excellent career in programming. But we had changed schools and planned to get married, and to graduate with a computer science degree meant postponing our wedding two years. Instead I got what was called an Interdisciplinary degree. It was called a "waste basket" degree because it catches the credits that would be trash. It finds places for all your classes to count for something, and you have two concentrations. My major concentration was business (my father was thrilled!), and my minor concentration computer science. Even then I knew in the back of my mind that the entire degree belonged in the waste basket.

After graduation I stayed home while my husband went off to work and I had no idea what to do with myself. I'd made a mistake and didn't know how to fix it. My degree couldn't even get me temp jobs and I was miserable. We both decided I would go back to school. I enrolled in Winthrop and two years later graduated with an MBA with accounting emphasis, an excellent GPA, an incredible job offer at the third largest accounting firm in the world (at the time), and once again hating the choice I'd made. I liked bookkeeping and auditing but hated all the philosophies of accounting. I couldn't sit still longer than ten minutes when trying to read the books that promised to prepare me for the CPA exam. That was when I learned that being good at something didn't mean you liked it. I'd been raised to strive for excellence and I was smart, successful, desirable, and unhappy.

During the summer before I was to begin my job, I began having health problems. I was told there was a good chance I couldn't have kids. We'd had some issues in the past with this and we both got scared. We decided children were more important than my career. I have never regretted that decision. I got pregnant after a few months and we had a beautiful baby girl! The moment they put her in my arms I felt at peace.

Zayda

Of course, as most stay-at-home moms do, I got bored. When I'd been at Winthrop getting my MBA, my husband's aunt had sent me a bracelet for my birthday. She left the tag on and the price was $15 for beads and base metals. I thought, "This is pretty, but I can make it myself for way cheaper!" I had started beading to alleviate the boredom. Beading was what I turned to again. It turned out, as it usually does, that I was good at it...and I liked it.

I would sit with my daughter, bead necklaces, and watch "That's Clever" on tv. One day they had a woman who had a torch and melted some glass to make these adorable little beads. She made her own beads!! Oh my gosh!! You can make your own beads?? Wow, that would be way cheaper than buying them! That's so cool! But it was something I could never do. Yes, I was very hands-on, and crafty, and I rode horses and bailed hay and chased cows and tossed 50lb hay bails around when I was a teenager, but a torch was just too dangerous; it was out of my league. Oh well. Sigh.

Part 3 here.

My Studio - Part 1

My blog posts have been few and far between. I was thinking about that the other night. It occurred to me that it might be nice to post about the studio we're working on. The problem is, for it to be significant, it would have to be clear what it means to me. Everyone would have to understand what lampworking means to me.

In order for that to happen, I have to go farther back than 3 years ago, when I first started lampworking. I have to go back much, much farther. So, here goes. It may take more than one post...hopefully those posts will actually be written.

My childhood sucked. There's no other way to put it. It was a blessing to graduate from high school a year early and go off to college. I went to Clemson as a pre-vet major. All my life I wanted to be a vet.

Some classes I had no problems acing, like biology and english, others I struggled with. For some classes, like chemistry, it was that I was thrown in with 100 other students in an auditorium and taught things that I had never seen before, while the two guys a few seats away complained about the material; apparently they had already learned it in high school. I'd taken the most advanced classes offered in my high school and the hardest thing we did was memorize the periodic table. Oddly enough, though, I had no problems in organic chemistry, where most students failed.

The other classes I struggled with were my animal science classes. They were easy enough. In fact, after growing up on a farm, I found them almost too easy. I just despised what we were required to do. I seemed to be the only one who had a problem with doing things like cutting a baby pig's stomach open to castrate him while he squealed with pain and tried desperately to free himself from between my knees, or giving daily bottle-feedings to a calf until he was ready for slaughter. When I questioned why we had to do things that way, why we couldn't anesthetize, I was told it was because that was how the farmers did it. Just because they do it that way doesn't mean it's right.

Like I said, I was struggling. I was, like I had been for most of my life, lost. Then halfway through my sophomore year, as fate would have it, I met my husband. He was a business major (which my dad always told me was a joke). He was cute, sweet, sensitive, and considerate. We were friends first, and we are friends still. For the first time in my life, I was found.

Continue with part 2 here.

Fabulous Friday Weekly Promo Sale!

Today's Fabulous Friday Weekly Promo Sale item is:

Twisted Opals

Normally $13, if you type FFWPS in the comments box upon check-out you'll get this fantastic focal bead for only $11.05!* Find it at Artfire or Etsy.


* Price difference will be refunded after payment

Fabulous Friday Weekly Promo Sale and New Rule!

Here is the new rule - to get 15% off, you MUST put "FFWPS" in the comments section upon check-out! The 15% will be refunded to your Paypal account.

This week's item is:

Rocky Mountain

Find it at Artfire or Etsy! Normally $13, if you enter the code above you'll receive a refund of $1.95 making it only $11.05!