Liliana at work...

This is what it looks like.
This is what it sounds like.
This is what it feels like...
I love love melting glass :)

In this video, I'm making a focal glass bead with layers and layers of petals; the flowers will eventually be encased. While I'm at the torch, I often listen to WBUR which you're hearing in the background. In the evenings I switch to Paradise Radio.

New LilianaBead Work featured at Natick Artists Open Studios

Silence is golden..
I don't think this saying works in this paradigm and yet I have a lot of silence in my everyday life.
I go to the studio in the morning -usually around 8am or so, turn NPR on and listen to it while working with my glass.
Every once in a while I chat with my studio mates and fellow artists with whom I share projects and ideas. Most late evenings I go home and become an active member of a family of 7 - not exactly golden and not exactly silence... :)
What about blogging? Hence this entry.

Natick Artist Open Studios is coming up on October 16 and 17 here in Natick.
I will be in my studio #2 at 43 Main on the second floor. At least two new collections will be there for your viewing.

I have a new collection of beads--inspired by the concept of water—into which I incorporate fine silver wire. This design is built on a specialty of mine - fine silver inside glass. The wire technique introduces continuity while a prism of layers and layers of clear give the sensation of movement in these pieces. This is a collection built on my visual and social experience of water - while I know what water looks like and feels like, the moment of seeing moving water is undeniably fleeting. Each time I look at one of these beads I see something different.

I've heard wonderful feedback from my customers about these beads and several of them have become partners in aesthetically driven relationships... :) Yes, they are out there...

There is another collection that may interest you. This one is a result of my collaboration with Marie Picard Craig - a Natick artist photographer. She's been working with me on my tutorials and occasionally photographing my work for a couple of years now. Marie's talent and skill nurtured and fueled her interest to incorporate the photographs of my beads into her photos of nature. The end-result is simply amazing!

Marie and I are working on a book on the fruits of our creative relationship. In the meantime, we published a calendar to hopefully tease your interest and get you excited about our collaborative work.
If you can't make it to the Open Studios and would like to acquire this calendar, please e-mail me to inquire about cost etc.

Looking forward to hearing from and/or seeing you.
Cheers

To learn more about the Natick Artists Open Studios and the participants, go to www.natickartistsopenstudios.com
To see examples of Marie Picard Craig's Work, visit her website at www.mariecraigphoto.com

A NEW LilianaBead Tutorial Out There - Fancy Ribbon Design

I prefer it when the tutorial is all done and ready to be read, enjoyed and used for guidance.

This tutorial focuses on a design of my own which I call Fancy Ribbon. Layers of color and movement as if it is a fancy ribbon floating in a freshwater stream.

Below are some excerpts - visual and linguistic - to introduce this tutorial to you.

o Learn to detect consistency by studying the heat color in your glass. Red heat color communicates hard clay, orange – soft clay, and yellow – paint. The most advantageous and empowering location is of course on the margins. For example, managing orange-yellow heat-colored glass is much easier.

o After winding discs always hot-fuse them by gently heating them to an orange-red heat color to the side of it rather than from the top. The discs transmit heat unevenly which makes them extremely vulnerable to thermal shock.

o Melt the bead in the upper part of the middle section of the flame.

Steps 15, 16 &17: Encase the bead.

Open Studios for Natick Artists

This is one busy week as I'm getting ready for the Open Studios this week-end.

Saturday and Sunday
October 17-18
Noon - 5pm
http://www.natickopenstudios.org/

Stop by and say hello.

Apple Core Inspired

I don't know if you know this...
(1) I can crack an apple open in half with my hands.
(2) I eat the entire apple. Yes, the apple core included.

You probably don't know that growing up in Moldova, a mainly agricultural country which at the time was the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia...
(1) I ate fresh apples only during their ripe season and otherwise my dad, who had access to farmers and their harvest, would bring cases of fresh apples to the city and store them in his cellar. That is why we ate apples and hence they were quite exotic to us during off-season periods. In my family the entire apple was consumed.
(2) In my school not everyone's father stored apples for the winter and I, like many others, had to share with my classmates. I didn't like when people bit out of my food, so I learned how to crack apples in perfect halves with my bare hands. Sometimes I cracked those halves into two more halves depending on how many kids wanted a bite of my apple at the time.

It's nice to share and bring to the surface these memories. It's even nicer and very curious to see what comes out of this experience - an apple core lampwork bead. Who would have known?

I'm including a slideshow of images/art/craft I found on the web. There is an abundance of expression driven and influenced by the apple core - thank Goddess of All Apples :)

Thinking about designing while I'm getting ready to write Part II of the Apple Core Tutorial

As I'm getting ready to write the Part II of the Apple Core Tutorial, I'm thinking of all the seminars, lectures and workshops where people come together to discover and articulate their voice and style.

To me designing is about
(1) paying tribute to those who have been designing with glass (and other media) many years before I came into the process
(2) spending the time to understand and to address my own aesthetic principles that move me emotionally and intellectually.

In this day and age with the democratizing of the medium includes making access to equipment and materials easy and affordable, and encouraging a culture of sharing in respect to knowledge and skills. Those of us who enjoy working with glass and value the ways of the glass to facilitate self-expression, take it to the next level, i.e., the marketing and the selling of the product we create.

I get so excited and thrilled when I see that the crafter, in addition to making her/his product available for sale, has also made an effort to show the customers that s/he spent energy, thought and time to make glass speak for them and help them express themselves. If not, then the question for me, is why else would I do it? Now more than ever the market is full of glass creations, so why would I buy something unless it helped me connect to its creator who thinks, feels like me--or quite the opposite, and that can be exciting as well, enough for me to want to purchase it.

Here’s the story that I want to share with you to show you my path which led to the apple core design and collection.

A few years back I took a class with Jim Smircich. Among his wonderful demonstrations, he showed us how he made HIS apple core. You can check it out in almost any publication about his work. It was in the middle of the demo when I felt an arousal of my creative energy as I watched the disc placed between the two bridged beads melt. The disc was pushing down and out while the rest of the glass was drawn by the heat to the surface of the bead – what an innovative technique and a sensuous experience all in one. After the class was over, I spent hours making Jim’s apple core and watching the disc melt. Being somewhat attention deficient, I started sticking things on the bottom before I applied the disc, like metal etc. I have a few designs that incorporate the fruits of that period. They include the Constellation Collection and the Aurora Borealis Collection.
So, while continuing to experiment with the Apple Core technique I simultaneously started enjoying the dots to stripes technique (I show how to make this bead in my Part 1 Apple Core Tutorial) and did that for a long time till my brain/experience took me to marrying the two together, thus creating the current LilianaBead Apple Core Collection. Hence, the Mother & Daughter Duo.

By bringing the two designs together into one Apple Core Bead, I recognize the connection between the two but mainly I want to encourage you to make similar connections in your experience with glass and design. Isn’t this the reason why you’re lampworking: to create collections that only you could have thought of because you are an individual with creative and intellectual powers which are characteristic only to you and no one else?

While we come out of a community, we are our own idiosyncratic selves - Let’s celebrate that!

Selling Online Also Means Enlarging Your Social Footprint

If you are just starting to market and sell your artwork online or you've already been working at it for a while, it is worth to you to consider expanding your online presence continually. The more shops your work is in, the more networking you're doing, the larger your social footprint is online.

Do you have a Facebook presence?
Do you have a Twitter presence?
Do you have a Flickr presence?
Do you have a Blog?

In addition to expanding your social network, multiply the shops your work is in. These shops are built in ways that even those with few computer skills can sell their artwork successfully.

Use the same name for your shops which is your business name and you will find that all roads lead to Rome - Rome being you and your wonderful creations.

At first I thought it would be difficult to keep so many shops online and manage them all efficiently. But because all these sites are made extremely user-friendly, I found that it is actually quite easy once you have the following:

1. Have your listing done with pictures and use the same info in all your shops.
2. In your note to the customers let them know when you will have their item shipped. Make sure that you allot enough time for yourself to finish the task. As long as you tell them ahead of time, you can take up to a couple of weeks to ship the item to them.
3. Create a calendar where you keep track of your tasks. It helps a lot when I feel overwhelmed with orders.

Whatever you decide to do, in the end we all want our work to sell. The best way to do it is to have a presence in multiple shops where your customers are looking to make their next purchase.

In the meantime I'll just keep posting new items in my artfire shop FOR FREE :)
This a recent shop where I have been offering my work for sale.

I hope you consider opening your own shop on Artfire. Click below to go there and get your shop now. Let me know how I can help and I will be glad to do it.

Register on ArtFire.com

LilianaBead Tutorials Available Now

I've been a teacher for many years now.
I taught public speaking, rhetoric at several universities and colleges, but my passion for the last several years has been lampworking.

I love to teach glass, heat, gravity and design in part because the students in those classes really want to be there - that makes all the difference sometimes :) I think of the lampworking process as communication. The communication between

• your urge to create and the powerful medium you're creating with
• your desire to learn a skill and the ways of the medium to teach you those skills
• ways of interpreting the clues of the process and translating those into design
• glass and heat and gravity
• and much more

So far I've created two tutorials to share some of the knowledge I've accumulated and formulated over the years. My teaching style is reflected in these tutorials in that I am quite informal in my interaction with glass while paying close attention to observations I make during the process and systematizing those. Each step is an instruction followed by numerous clues that you should watch for in order to make that long-term investment.

The tutorials contain pictures of each step in the process. In my Basic Horizon Tutorial I took the pictures myself - a long and tedious process. In my second tutorial, LilianaBead Apple Core Design - Starting with the Center - Part One, I was aided by my friend, an accomplished photographer and artist, Marie (www.mariecraigphoto.com). You will find wonderful photos accompanying each step of this tutorial.

My intention is to keep creating tutorials of my designs as I believe in my heart that sharing knowledge and making it available to others is very important. My preferred way to share knowledge is by teaching in a classroom environment. I will be teaching two workshops this year at Snow Farm. Please my website for more info and/or browse the Snow Farm Catalog (you can access it by clicking the pic on your upper right).