Tuesday 30 April 2013

Light Blue Shadow


I think it’s time to try something new! I’m going to try something new and review a few beads in the week and then on the weekend make a bracelet up with them. Fingers crossed it works!

The first bead was picked at random by Nic and is the Light Blue Shadow. This bead forms part of the Contemporary kit which was retired in January 2013, but there are still a lot of these about if you wanted the kit or just the LB Shadow bead. 
 

Within the kit you will find;
Light Blue Shadow, Green Shadow both these beads share the same design – they are clear glass with irregular shapes (mainly oval) holding the colour these seem to be just under the surface of the bead, but higher than the core.
Red Symmetry, Brown Symmetry, Purple Symmetry and Blue Symmetry. These beads feature a translucent core in the particular colour and then rather vibrant squares with a white edge to them.


It was a shame to see this kit be retired as I loved them all, I think that people may have been put off by the eclectic mix of colours, but I think the fact they share similar designs means that they work well together, or you could just use them in 6 different bracelets!


For a colour comparison I have put it next to a few other blue beads. Seeing them together makes the LB Shadow look more white than blue, which put a spanner in the works beacuse I did the text for this blog before the pictures!


This bead would work perfectly on a winter themed bracelet, it feels cool and icy. Being quite neutral hopefully it will work with the other beads picked out this week!

Tuesday 23 April 2013

2x2

I've had a bit of a case of writers block, so have decided to try a quick little post on my phone to see if that will help! Here's how I took to wearing my new beads from the Trollbead Crawl. They don't really match in a theme, the Tormulated Quartz and Agate Dentric were bought to mirror each other, but I then found the 'Black Braid' that I thought I had sold and had to wear it as I love it!
Silver Mountain goes amazingly with the Quartz and that's where the idea to pair my beads came from!

I had an excuse to wear my new Coral Stripe bead too!

Let me know what you think and if you have anything you'd like me to blog (cheeky hope for inspiration! :P)

Monday 8 April 2013

3rd Annual Bristol Trollbead Crawl.



If you follow me on Twitter (@Mokeymike) where I was live tweeting the whole day) you will have seen that I was lucky enough to attend the 3rd Annual Bristol Trollbead Crawl. Organised by a couple of very lovely ladies (and avid collectors) the idea is for a group of Trollbead collectors to get together and go to all the local retailers.

I had agreed with myself that I would only buy one bead. Probably the Agate Dendritic or Ruby Rocks as these beads vary so much it’s worth seeing them in real life and the retailers had ordered extras for us to admire.

We all met at Cribbs and headed off in a convoy of 3 cars. Our first stop took us to Gifted in Nailsea (BS48 1RG, if you fancy taking a trip there yourself – but don’t buy the tigers eye or Silver Retired Clown that I wish I had bought!) they had laid out a table with lots of OOAKs (glass and amber) New beads on bracelets and multiples of the Brand new (and unreleased Royal Orange bead) Ruby Rocks and Agate Dendritic. They also had the beautiful Aurora Bangle!


They offered us a really generous 10% off all purchases and I had to take advantage when I saw a beautiful Agate that was really black with a few specks of white in it. In all the photos I have seen this bead has been mostly white with a few black bits. I want to, one day, own all the precious stones and this one works brilliantly as a juxtaposition to the Tormulated Quartz.
The lovely Ladies at Gifted had made up a goody bag which had some lovely smelling hand cream, a pack of novelty tissues and a little notebook. A few lucky ladies also got a sparkly mini torch for pre-ordering the new Aurora.

After Gifted we headed to Sue Foster in Clifton (BS8 4BT) this was a really cute boutique with lots of pieces of jewellery that Sue herself calls eclectic. She had trays and trays of beads and they seemed to keep coming! Some really beautiful treasures were snapped up here, but I was being good and didn’t buy anything (even though I saw a bead that went perfectly with my new Orange Dillo – more of that in another post)

It was time for lunch, and after a brief walk in the sun through the wonderful Clifton we headed to a cafe called Fahrenheit 419. The service was a little slow, but this just gave us chance to examine the morning’s purchases, look at the AMAZING collections everyone was wearing. Play with the swap beads and admire Beth’s Small and Beautiful beads.


Time was running away with us, and it was time to head to Jools in Bristol (BS1 3XA) I was really looking forward to this, as you know, I love Jools and they had got lots of stock in for us, so they had more retired beads and OOAKs than usual. They also ran a competition so for every bead bought you got a raffle ticket to win the White Jewellery Box. We spent a very long time playing with the beads, lots of ladies wanted the retired pink prism, so we destroyed their displays to choose from them all! Ooops!




While we were all playing with all the beads I saw lots of beads I had never seen before, the retired Polar Bear is lovely, but I couldn’t work out how it would look on a bracelet. I did however get talked into buying Tupilak, an early Trollbead which is small like Mocha, but has 3 faces on it. I was umming and ahhing about it and then I realised that 2 of the faces shared one mouth, not only is this cute, but it work really well with my love of symmetry and I had to have it!
I also saw an amazing Red Tigers Eye which had the most brilliant flashes in it! Better than any I had ever seen, so I had to have that too. And then I saw a Wave of dreams with a lovely Greeny/Blue wave and a dark half and a light half and I knew this had to become part of my collection too as it would work with so many of the beads I have already.
My Days Purchases

The last stop for me was House of Frasier. I was a bit worried about going here, because although Nic works there, I have never received very good service from them and their stock levels have always been a bit poor. But the ladies organising the trip had been in and met a lovely member of staff and told me that they had lots of stock in. Unfortunately, as soon as I got there a member of staff was really rather rude, and when the rest of the gang turned up it only got worse. Luckily there was another sales assistant that could help those not put off the beautiful beads, and she even took the wrist shot, making an official part of the gang!



The rest of the Crawl continued to another Jewellers, but I had to give it a miss.

A massive thank you to Helen and Amanda, and here is to next year! (Hopefully a few more people can join us!) :D

Friday 5 April 2013

Here’s to 05/07/13.


So 5th July 2012 was the day I started my blog and up until now I have had over 7000 page views! That is completely mad and I can’t say thank you enough for taking the time to read my ramblings and leave your comments.
 
I would love love love to get to 10k views by the time we reach the milestone that is my 1st anniversary of blogging. In order to try and hit that milestone  (2200 hits in 3 months! Eeeekk)I have lots and lots of new posts in the pipeline!! :D
 If you have anything you would like to see more (or less) of please let me know.

Thank you again for having a gander.

Mike!
xx

Tuesday 2 April 2013

I wanna see your Peacock



So following on from the very exciting parcel from Denmark holding my cherished Chess Lock I have to tell you about another very special bead that has had a very long journey. The bead went from Trollbead HQ in Denmark to Rome to Holland and then to me (thank you very much special Troll Fairy!)

This bead (that is amazing) is part of a limited edition collection of Unique beads called Small and Beautiful. There have been 800 kits of 6 beads created, and there are about 27 beads in the collection. Check out this post for a really cohesive list of the beads, with photographs, thanks Leann!

The reason this bead had to make such a long journey was because there was only one retailer in the UK selling these beads and due to their popularity the site crashed!
So... Without further ado here is my Small and Beautiful Peacock Bead!


This bead really appealed to me as it reminds me of my mum who collected Peacock feathers from Fiji when we went to visit family in 1996. It also reminds me of visiting my grandparents who have Peacock feathers in their house.

The beads are much very small (and you can now get some called Big and Beautiful with a Unique core which are normal sized) I tried to find a few beads which were standard sized so you could get an idea of the size so here it is with Amazonite and Blue Agate.

The colours are amazing, I love beads that have lots of colours and details in them; it means that closer you look the more details you can see. I'm afraid the pictures don't do it much justice. 
Here's a side view, I think that lots of these S&Bs have internal bubbles in them, but I don't notice it much when I'm wearing it:

I wanted to showcase my Peacock bead and was in a bit of a rush as I was going to see my family in Birmingham so I picked a few beads and grabbed my leather bracelet and this is what I created. I spaced out the beads with small silvers so that the Peacock doesn’t look too small.
I never wear my leather untwisted so I had to tuck it around itself to keep it tight.




I hope you like it!
xx