Christmas is Coming!!

Wow, I feel that my little size 3's have not touched the ground. With Christmas fast approaching we have definitely got into the spirit and have been encouraging others by offering our Christmas decoration workshops. Lucy and I also visited the German Market which is running at The Oxford Castle site. We went a couple of Fridays ago when it opened and when the Oxford lights were turned on. There was a lot happening all over the city centre. I think the lights this year look great...

With the chandelier theme they remind me of Oxford Street in London when the lights were based on the film Enchanted.

Our Christmas workshops have been received very well again this year. We have delivered Christmas decorations with Beads & Wire and Beaded Christmas Baubles. All of our workshops were full and everybody very pleased with what they made. All the baubles look great together.

Last weekend we had an Introduction to Beads & Wire - again a great day. Mum did this workshop because she wanted to finish off a necklace she designed in my Introduction to Precious Metal Clay Workshop. This is what she made...

She had already made the butterfly in the PMC workshop then wanted to add chain and beads to create the tails. She's used swarovski crystals with cultured pearls and a small belcher chain along with some wiring techniques then for the string around the neck a stringing technique with crimps and a hoop and bar clasp. She's very proud of her work!

We have also been working on projects to go into two magazines Fine Silver and Creative Beads and Jewellery. For the Fine Silver magazine I have made a pair of cufflinks out of PMC which I have enamelled with cobalt blue and turquoise - they have been sent off to the photographer so I'll show you when they return. The second project is a beading project based on our Beaded Daisy. We use rivolis, delicas, size 15's and dagger beads to create these pretty pendants. I'v been wanting to start providing projects for some of the jewellery making magazines so this is great start for me.

We've been quite lucky here in Oxford not to get too much snow...so far!! Its still very cold though- even Harry's feeling chilly so we've been putting him in his little jumper.

Catching Up

Well things here at The Oxford Bead Shop have really moved on. We now have a Lampwork Studio...Yay!! I am sssoooo pleased with it. Here it is...

So, as you can see we have lampworking benches on one side and silversmithing benches on the other. The lampworking stations are set up to accomodate 3 people and the silversmithing 4. I can't wait to start tecahing in there. My first lampworking class in on January 22nd and its already full..my second is on 6th March and that's full too!!! I'm going to look at the diary today and try and fix a date in February. We launched the Studio at our workshop taster evening on Friday 29th October. The night went fantastically well, we had about 50-60 people attend and we raised £56.00 for Breast Cancer Research. Lucy and I were demonstrating how to make Lampwork beads, I also did a Button Necklace and PMC Demo, Fiona ran a beads and wire workshop to make a bookmark, Becky did a beads and knotting workshop to make a bracelet and Bella did a textured silver pendant. Mum was demonstrating and answering questions on our beads and stitching workshops, Kay was holding fort on the till and Mary was making sure everybody had a drink. We were all very busy - I'm not sure what the neighbourhood thought was happening...as the night went on the windows became fogged up and we were full to the brim!!

Pete (Lucy's Boyf) was called upon to take photos for the night - he did fabulously well. All our photos can be seen on our Facebook page. We also launched our 2011 workshop programme that can be viewed on our website.

With Christmas just around the corner we have been preparing some new kits that are perfect little stocking fillers. This week we made a Memory Wire Bracelet Kit and a Charm Bracelet Kit - I'm really pleased with them. We have a few Craft Fairs coming up before Christmas so I thought these would work nicely. Our Bauble kits are flying of the shelves - they are so pretty and easy to make.

We have the first of our Christmas workshops today - Christmas Decorations with beads and wire. I'm feeling very Christmassy - is that wrong??