Last year I attended a couple of lampwork bead making classes at West Dean College, and fell in love. After much discussion with 'im outdoors, he agreed to make me a small studio at the bottom of the garden so I could continue safely at home (where I was planning to house some chickens. Sorry chickens).
I found a couple of sash windows and a pair of french doors on Facebook marketplace and we spend an afternoon driving round to collect them. With these in place we knew how big we could build the studio and a plan was created.
Over the autumn 'im outdoors built it and over the winter fitted it out for me, with a work bench and storage. And then electric was fitted.
I'd found a small kiln on Facebook and bought other bits and bobs needed so just had to order my oxgyen concentrator and torch, only to find that there were massive delays in oxgyen concentrators across the country!
As you can imagine my disappointment was huge (luckily I had a few runs to keep me occupied). In the end I waited 3 months for them to arrive. I could have hugged the poor delivery driver when they turned up.
We then spent a couple of hours in the studio getting things set up and I was good to go. I was very grateful of a bank holiday weekend to spend a bit of time playing and checking everything worked as expected.
Except for programming the kiln to hold its temperature for 4 minutes instead of 4 hours everything seemed to work perfectly.
My head, and sketchbook are full of ideas I'd like to try and I'm looking forward to seeing what I can achieve. And I've created an instagram account so I can quickly share photos of the beads as I make them.
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