Spiral Bracelets!

 I am working to rebuild my stock of spiral rope bracelets. Midnight Meandering is a great black-on-black bracelet that will work well with a variety of Gothic styles. I really like the black-lined clear seed beads in the core, they give it a lot of depth.

Purple Overload also features lined clear beads, but in this case it's a shimmering purple at the core. This was a really tricky bracelet to photograph, those pearly outer beads tend to really reflect the light and turn into a blur in pictures. I don't think I'll be designing with them again any time soon.

But hey, enough about that! It's New Years Eve! I hope you all have a fun and safe evening. Thank you to everyone who has made 2012 a really successful year for me. I hope you'll stick with me in 2013, because I have plans. Oh yes. Plans! Bwahahahah.

Did you have some happy holidays?

Did you enjoy the holiday season? Topher sure did! He decided this bit of wrapping paper was a bag and crawled right inside -- you can see his tail in the corner of the couch on the left side, barely. He's also been enjoying the shoe box that the paper was wrapped around, as it is perfectly Topher-sized. Plus there's been so much tissue paper to shred! And we haven't even reached the big gift exchange with my family on the First. Truly, it is a good season to be a Fluffmonster.

Anyway, now that Christmas is past, my Etsy shop is open once more! And starting this afternoon I will be back to listing items in my continuing quest to get all of my current stock listed in the shop. Plus I will keep making new things, so be sure to check this blog regularly for in-progress posts and pictures of the goodies I'm making for myself.

No more Anonymous Comments

My apologies to my friends who have previously used the Anonymous comments option. Spammers have been abusing the hell out of it, and whereas previously Google's filters would catch the comments and delete them pretty quickly, I found that one of my posts had EIGHT comments going back as far as 5 days, and most of not all linking to some really disgusting sites. Excuse me, Blogger, but how exactly did that get through your filters? My site clearly has nothing to do with the sort of content they were offering.

After having to manually delete all those comments, and worrying that there may be others lurking on other posts, I am considering migrating all 3 of my blogs to other platforms. I'll make a decision after the holidays.

Closed for the holidays!

Earlier today I put my Etsy shop into vacation mode for the holidays. Normally I leave it open after my soft shipping deadline just in case someone wants something last-minute and is willing to have it overnighted, but those transactions are just so stressful! So this year one of my gifts to myself is actually closing the store entirely until the 26th.

I will still be blogging in-progress projects, though, and who knows what else, so keep checking in over here. I am in a beading mood. On these cool nights it's nice to watch a DVD with a blanket and a tray of beads in my lap, with endless cups of tea.

Allegory Gallery Seed Bead Fun

 In order to make things more interesting around here, I'm going to be posting more in-progress pictures of projects. I plan to do a lot of seed beading in 2013, so there should be a lot of fun projects for me to document.

My first project involves the Black Beach Bonfire seed bead mix from Allegory Gallery. I shamelessly stole the above photo from their website because it shows the full range of this beautiful mix, whereas my pic below has it in a tube where it looks a little blah.

Because there are so many colors in the mix I decided to go with a simple black onyx cabochon for the focal piece. I'm not sure yet what else I'll be using, but I think there will be some golden key charms to pull out the gold in the mix, and to make it appropriate for Wild Wild West Con in March. I really need to beef up my steampunk stock, and this will have cross appeal for Goths, too. Plus I just really like keys!

Disclaimer: Some items in this blog post were provided for promotional consideration. I am receiving no other compensation for my blogging.