One way to get inspired is to occasionally hang out with fellow lampworkers.  I’m fortunate enough to live near Atlanta, which is large enough to have a community of lampworkers and beadmakers who come together as the Southern Flames, which is a chapter of the International Society of Glass Beadmakers.  People always come to the monthly meetings wearing their work, and bringing additional pieces to show and receive commentary on.  Where else can you, live and in person, see such a rich variety of styles and approaches to lampwork but in a gathering of your peers?  (Well, there’s The Gathering, but I would expect that it goes beyond comprehensibility to overload.)

At tonight’s meeting we held the annual Bead Swap, where when it is your turn to pick an item from those brought to swap, you can either “steal” an item someone else already has, or open a new item.  There was a huge variety of beautiful work there, from the adorably cute to the daintily feminine to the utterly stunning.  Every piece had inspiration and technique to offer.

I felt rather good in the end, because although my contribution (a set of boro rounds) was one of the last few items opened, it still had a chance to be stolen from its original selector! I was also amused to hear all the “what did they use?” comments as the set was passed around for everyone to see.  The guys (Brian, Carl, and Michael, who all work boro) figured it out, but all of the women assumed it was one of the expensive hot-thing COE104 silver glasses.  Nope, just boro!

The Southern Flames Demo Day was yesterday. For $10 you get to sit there all day and watch demos by your fellow glass artists, schmooze with them, and eat a yummy chili lunch. I always opt for Gerry’s white bean and chicken chili — not too hot and utterly delish.

The six demos were as varied as the members’ interests. Nita van Til started off with a shockingly easy “gold bead” — white, pale aqua, silver foil, voila! Karen Barefield followed up with her take on setting cubic zirconias in beads. Sadly, you can’t use CZs with boro. Then Brian Renoud showed how to do two boro pendants. That, of course, I watched with full attention, and I think it paid off — I did a pendant tonight myself, and though the design might not be great, I think I DID finally do a successful loop!

After lunch we had Marcy Lamberson with a heart landscape bead, Diane Kovach with a semi-hollow Bullseye fish, and finished off the day with Lance McRorie sculpting the human figure. After some hassling from the female contingent of the audience, Lance agreed to do a male figure, not a perky-boobed female, for once. It’s always fun and educational to see how different people approach glass, and how each person’s personality ends up reflected in their product.

Dee came over from Augusta for the day, just for this, and Mincot was there, of course. That was just the icing on the cake, getting to hang out with my two favorite glassy peeps, as well as some other wonderful folks.

The Larry Scott class offered through Southern Flames last weekend was, to me, many things:

• A huge education. Larry demonstrated many tricks and techniques that I had never before seen, and explained some things I had seen before in a new way so that I finally “got it.” I sort of understood the idea behind linear encasing already, but was missing one little aspect — the very acute angle of the casing rod relative to the bead. Now I can do it (though I still need practice, duh). I’m also totally sold now on using boro punties for making cane and latticcino, because my hands can twist the punties much easier than mandrels.
• An impressively-run workshop. Southern Flames knows how to do things right! The organization provides bagels & cream cheese if you don’t have time for breakfast; the class TA takes lunch orders and brings your lunch back so you don’t lose so much time going out to get it; various little things like mandrel holders, stickers to put on your mandrels, water cups, and so on are already set up. Oh, and Carl was a most excellent TA.
• A really, really frustrating experience. Okay, so I was the least-experienced glass person in the class, and it did show at times. I was working on a Minor burner, when I run a Bethlehem Piranha at home, so my torch wasn’t always doing what I expected. I didn’t have quite enough elbow room so had to be careful of the space around me. Possibly the worst thing, though, was the floor right behind my chair — every time someone walked on it, it jiggled, jiggling me, usually right when I was trying to precisely place a dot on my bead. I’m dot-challenged enough anyway, so I don’t need any further hindrance. In the end, of the six beads I attempted, only one came out fairly decent. Four others were more or less showing the technique but far from acceptable, and the last one…well, the Night Sky bead went into the water cup after first the bead release broke and then the bead itself broke.Some things are just better attempted at home on familiar ground!
• A veritable feast of eye candy. Larry’s beads are to die for. I wish I could have afforded to buy more than one. I’ll just have to practice making my own variations.

I did indeed get my money’s and time’s worth out of the weekend, and I would highly recommend Larry’s classes to any lampworker. Any problems with the class were strictly due to the student, not the teacher, LOL.

At the last Southern Flames meeting, I was off to the side filling out my form as I tried to choose which of three beads from the Folk School class I was going to submit to be photographed for the 2006 postcard. Walter, one of the long-time members, looked over my shoulder to see the beads. When I mentioned that I’d only been lampworking for seven months, he commented, “Really! I’m very impressed!”

Nice, especially since I was feeling particularly klutzy (having knocked a container of the shop’s beads onto the floor a few minutes earlier) and inferior (from seeing all the other GORGEOUS beads from other people) at that moment.