Focals Calling

A Day With Focals

   A dry morning, wow two in three days, we will be wearing shorts and sunglasses by friday ! The skies may be grey but at least it's dry and the wind as eased so all is happy here, I'm sure I'll get an hour or two in the garden later with more young plants to set out and a few more beds to hoe.
   On the bead side of things it's a focal day here for me, so one happy beadmaker who will be enjoying playing with lots of colours and lots of rock effects, I can't think of a better way to spend the day. I have beads to clean and photograph and still I have to list beads on ebay, so it looks like another busy day.
   Tomorrow I'm spending the day in the clay room throwing pots and I hope making my first oil lamps, we'll see how things go but fingers crossed they turn out ok. Also I get to make the pieces for the first ceramic bird feeder, some may say a silly idea but I want to make one for our garden and if the resulting feeder is ok then I'll list a couple in the etsy shop, you never know there may be a few fellow bird lovers out there who would like one.
   After a good friend explained how to string wind chimes I think I'll make the parts for those too, it's all worth trying as things are so slow with bead sales and to be honest I just love working with clay so I'm happy to play around with these ideas for as long as it takes. I guess the good thing about ceramics is there really is no end to what you can make, as I've said before with beads you can only make beads, ok hundreds of designs and colour mixes but in the end they are all beads, most of which are obtained by jewellery makers and the odd bead collector, with the vast selection of objects you can make from ceramics the customer range is also so vast, I could write a list a foot long showing hundreds of items you can produce from clay so maybe, just maybe there are a few in that list that I can make, we'll see.
   Ok, I better get back to my torch, it makes a change not to be dashing through the rain when returning to the barn, maybe by the weekend we'll have the sunshine back after all it is now May so touch wood the April showers are over !