Moving to ebay

I've moved a few sets to ebay and will be moving more. Here's the first two:




My Ebay is HERE.

And this one is off to Etsy.


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Secret Sale! Shh...

06/06 update: Now that my subscribers have had first pick, I'll share the link. This page will only be up for another day... so if you see something you like... The sale is HERE.

I'm having a sale for my loyal newsletter subscribers only. Here's a few items from that sale. You can subscribe to my newsletter for the next sale on the Holly's Folly home page.




I'm having a sale for my loyal newsletter subscribers only. Here's a few items from that sale.

If they haven't sold soon, they will head to ebay and you can get them there.

Art Bead Scene - Water Lilies

My entry for the Art Bead Scene's May 09 contest. Water lily lampwork focal, lentil and lily pads by Holly Dare / Holly's Folly ~ Glass.

The two toned necklace features Swarovski crystals and e beads in addition to the lampwork. The clasp is made of sterline and e beads that fit into the crystal loop.
This will be on Holly's Folly in a few days. Thanks for l@@king!

Color and Design

Color that works together is a hard thing for any new designer to grasp. That one of the reason's I find this year's Art Bead Scene contest so inspiring. By taking color hints from master painters, you have your colors chosen for you.

But choosing colors doesn't have to be difficult. There are a number of websites that let you play with color choices and combos. And Fire Mountain Gems has teamed up with Pantone to forecast jewelry colors for upcoming seasons. They do this months in advance for upcoming seasons.

The swatch above represents the "it" colors for Spring and Summer. The swatch below are the color predictions for fall.




As a beadmaker, I'm always thinking about color and new combinations. I often print up the swatches and keep them by my torch for inspiration.

What's YOUR favorite way of picking color?

Birthing Venus

Last month's Art Bead Scene contest was inspired by Botticelli's Birth of Venus. I struggled a bit the the design and ended up with something much more commercial looking than my usual fair.

I felt a real responsibility to the painting as it is one of my closest friend's favorites. She has seen it in person. I ended up making all sorts of beads I never even used in the finished piece. In the end, the little pink flowers floating in the sky / water of the background proved my greatest inspiration. And that seashell, of course.

Here is my entry. This piece will be on Holly's Folly in a few days.

Finding My Voice Workshops 5 & 6

Really behind posting here... I have a lot to say lately...just no time to say it.

Beads from my most recent FYV workshop:

This bead was to be inspired by a song. My thought precess went something like this:

In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight...

Lions, Lions...Hmmm...

Lions and tigers and bears OH MY!

Hmmm, I've always wanted a tiger bead set.

But I don't really wear earth tones that often. It would need to be purple...

IT WOULD NEED TO BE PURPLE!!!!

May I present to you...the Purple Tiger.

I ended up making another in a darker purple. Both will be on the Holly's Folly site later, under focals.


My most recent assignment was to seek inspiration in a child's book. I first thought of Alison's Zinna or the Good Dog Carl books. I'm a big Carl fan and have met "Carl" and his human mistress, writer Alexandra Day...but the animals seems way over my head and I surly wasn't going to tackle doing baby Madeline! As for Alison's Zinna... Anita Lobel, the author, is a former boss' mother-in-law. I've seen the orignal painting from one of the pages of the book...it was stunning. But alas, I couldn't find a copy of the book in time to do my homework.

I did find a copy of The Little Prince. I loved this book as a child. I used to doodle the drawings in my notebook as we studied the book in school. It was the first time I ever pondered my own drawing skills. I always loved the part about the rose.

As my luck goes, I had a rough week on the torch. I had an idea for a magazine contest (don't even ask...this particular magazine has the strictest pre and post publication rules I've ever read! I don't want to be disqualified... and I can tell you, my entry made it to the top 10!) . Anyway, this idea was larger and somewhat structural and every day, my bead broke! I've never had such heat control issues. Every day my confidence shrank. But I finally got that bead made...but I was feeling to confident when it came time to do my homework.

I figured this would shatter...but it didn't! It was exhilarating to work this way - rod in one hand, mandrel in another and a tool in the other ;-)

I was pleasantly surprised by this bead...

The Little Prince's Rose:



This will also be on the Holly's Folly site in a day or two.

Finding My Voice... The Photography Project

The homework in this week's Finding Your Voice Workshop (by Sylvie Lansdowne, on Facebook), was to go out and discover new photos...ones that might be potential beads.

I took over 40 photographs in just an hour in the creek and came home with tons of potential lampwork bead ideas. I also played around with the settings on my camera, taking photos in black and white, vivid color, cyan and sepia tones. The things you can learn from looking at the same old thing in a limited color palette is amazing.

In the end, this sepia toned photo really captured my imagination. I thought it would be fun to play around with the limited palette in my favorite earth tones.



The bead is not an actual interpretation...more like it was inspired by the photo. I really like this monochromatic palette and hope to play with it more.




This bead will be for sale on Holly's Folly in a few more days.

It's Happened....

The spammers have found me. I could understand it on my Creekhiker blog - I talk of politics and have an opinion on everything over there from movies to cake. But here...this was supposed to be for the tiny little bead community. So I didn't require comment approval.

But after an older post was hit last night, that's it, I'm done! From now on, all comments will be approved until Blogger figures out that blog authors really need a Delete comment* button.

For the record, I don't care if someone disagrees with me. However, you will not use my blog to spew filth, bigotry or to advertise something that I'm not paid for. So there... I do apologize to the few of you that do make comments for the inconvenience.

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*The best way to delete an unwanted comment on blogger??? Go into the Edit post section, hit the EDIT button by the name of the old post, select the html tab, copy contents and make note of the original publication date and time by hitting the arrow next to POST OPTIONS.

Hit the CREATE link. Select the HTML tab, paste your contents.

Hit arrow next to POST OPTIONS and type in your old publication time and date. Hit SAVE NOW.

If you had comments you wanted to save... this is a little trickier. They won't appear as comments any more but they can be posted as part of the blog. Below my content, I type COMMENTS:

Working under the COMPOSE link, I make this bold and Larger.

I open a new tab and go the spammed post comment section. I copy the "good" comments and simply paste them back into the post, omitting the spammer's post.

Don't forget to tag your post. Save as a draft - this allows you to tell the good post from the bad one. Get back to the EDIT posts section. Find the bad post. It will have the same title but one will say DRAFT and one should have comments beside it. DELETE the one with comments.

Go back into the draft and publish. Voila... your original post is back, good comments mostly intact and bad comment gone forever!

In case you are wondering which post got spammed or what the final re-do looks like: Go here.

Finding My Voice - The Memory Bead

So this week's homework assignment in Sylvie Landsdowne's Finding Your Voice workshop is to make a memory bead. We are only supposed to attempt this bead once but I felt so much pressure, I broke the rules and made four. I think my workshop members will forgive me when they find out why...

Two thoughts came to mind when I learned of the assignment. I've always wanted to make / own a bead made with the cremains of my beloved rottweiler, Maggie May. And I suddenly recalled a trip to Williamsburg, VA as a child where I purchased a worry stone. I loved having that thing in my pocket so much, I darn near rubbed a hole in it in less than a week!

I've always been a child who loved to collect rocks, acorns, cool sticks, etc. on my hikes. I guess I love having a bit of nature in my pocket. So I had a "shape" direction to go in.

And as for Maggie May - Maggie had been in Rottie Rescue for over a year when I got her. I actually had passed her over for another dog. When that girl died very suddenly and strangely, I ended up with Maggie. It took me months to commit to Maggie - I was still missing the first one. But in very short order, I realized Maggie was committed to me.



One winter night, I had been arranging some furniture in an office / laundry room adjacent to my bedroom. I finished and turned in. Some hours later, I slowly became aware of Maggie jumping on and off my bed - something she never did. I kept drifting back into a heavy sleep and then Mags would be tugging at my covers, then jumping on the bed.

Normally, if she needed to go out, she would go over the the blinds at the laundry room door and gently touch them. I'm a light sleeper so that would be enough to wake me and I would let her out. But on this night, she was sweeping those blinds like they were a cello. I was aware but I couldn't move.

Finally, Maggie tugged on my arm and I awoke as I was falling out of bed. Thinking she was ill, I ran to the door to open it, realizing on the way that I was overcome with nausea. As I raced inside to the bathroom, I smelled the gas! My house was full of it.

Later, as I thought about how close to death I had come and blowing up my house, I told Maggie that as long as I had so much as a shopping cart, she would always have a home. She was and is my hero. There is a good story I wrote on the Creekhiker blog as well as a bit about her ashes.

I know other beadmakers have used cremains in their beads and I've thought about having a bead made for me. But some part of me didn't want any part of Maggie going on a trip. I knew eventually, I would do it....just not this soon. This homework really made me stretch.

But I couldn't bring myself to use those ashes on something I might mess up on. So... there were four beads in this homework project.

The first, I was so worried about it breaking, I didn't melt the punty mark in well enough.

Round one: didn't melt the punty enough...flowers too light.

The second one, I tried to make a free-form loop but it shattered and I just made a feeble attempt at fixing it and threw it in the kiln. And I cried. It was a horrible torch day where nothing had worked and this just finished it! I literally considered selling my glass!

Round two - the loop broke, I panicked...

So I showed them to friends, artists of other mediums who give me invaluable insight. And then I went for a long hike and I realized aside from the size of the thumb grove, my biggest issue was the punty.

I fired up the torch again and puntied with clear and on the bottom of the piece. When I finished this one, I knew my idea would work and I was ready for Maggie's cremains to become part of the piece.

Round three, showing the thumb groove.

At first, I was so nervous as I poured a tablespoon of her ashes into one of my frit sifters over a shallow metal bowl. But in just seconds I was over it and actually stirred the ash to sift it better, carefully placing the chunkier bits back in Maggie's urn.

I melted some cranberry rod and dipped it in the cremains, heated and twisted and pulled a rather lumpy stringer.

The final piece was made with pastel rhubarb - my favorite for floral bases because it shifts color in the light. I'm a moody chicky - why shouldn't my memory stone be moody too???

I added leaf cane, then Maggie cane, then little flowers; got it all super hot to make my thumb hole, melted off the punty and tossed it in the kiln.

I had Maggie stringer left over and that was returned to her urn.

My final piece - the pink part contains Maggie's cremains.

I love this piece because the bits of cremains look like mica and sparkle in the sun. Just like my heroine did!

Finding My Voice

I've been taking a workshop on Facebook (is there anything that doesn't go on there??) on finding my voice as a beadmaker led by Sylvie Lansdowne. It's meant to encourage lampworkers to find their own path and avoid copying others.

This is week two of my class and we were to interpret a painting of Sylvie's choosing...she chose 24 for the fifteen of us to pick one. I got to pick first (thanks to my being on FB all the time!). I chose this one by Ford Smith called Serenity Rising.



And here is my interpretation (front and back):

I went for a very literal interpretation and I love the results. I went for this option because I enter a monthly contest on Art Bead Scene and this year, we are interpreting famous paintings into finished jewelry. I've longed to be able to do a literal translation in glass but the inspiration paintings there never "spoke" to me in that way. But this one did...

I was exhilarating working on this bead in the flame for over an hour, praying it didn't all turn to crap. I made a crucial mistake halfway through by putting in my treetops before finishing the water and trunks... that ruined my hope of it looking two dimensional with a flat / painted surface. But in the end, I realized that was sort of silly and I love the dimension I ended up with.

I also love how the devit on the purple makes the back look like a two dimensional version of the front.

This project was fun and eye opening for me! I hope to be able to do more of these. I also LOVE that I have a new favorite painter!