Guest blogger and some special orders

Greetings!  Guest blogger Chris reporting for duty.  I am under instructions to showcase some of the special order pieces that some of our customers requested.  So here goes...

This is the front view of a penguin couple that a little girl from North Carolina wanted us to make.  She and her dad visited us at the Flatwater Festival.  After viewing the single penguin that I had on hand, she decided that there needed to be a boy penguin and a girl penguin together.  The girl penguin has a little pink bow on the side of her head while the boy penguin just looks a bit goofy.  Steph worked out a design for displaying the two little penguins and included a trio of colored glass ice cubes.

This is the back view showing off the little penguin butts.  Everybody has one so why not celebrate it?!

Another special order that we received at the Flatwater Festival was from one of our fellow vendors.  It turns out that the gal next to us is getting married this fall.  She was browsing our booth and came across the beaded wine stoppers we had.  She decided that wine stoppers would make good attendant gifts, if only the beads were in the right colors.  Steph informed her that I could make beads in nearly any color combination she wanted.  She dug through the beads and marbles I had on hand and found a couple of things that she thought would be a good match.  This is what what we came up with... 

The top bead is a base of a CiM Mermaid glass encased in clear with a bit of frit from GG Glass in a middle depth layer.  The bottom bead is a mix of acid yellow and a couple of orange colored glass applied randomly and swirled.  Some dots of Double Helix glass finished it off.  Steph embellished both stoppers with wire, crystals and miscellaneous beads.  The orange and yellow stopper is currently still for sale however.  After consulting with her fiance, our bride-to-be decided that it was just too bright.  There is a replacement bead annealing in the kiln  in some more subdued colors as I type this post.  Hopefully it will be more to our customer's liking.

One last note, I will be at the Highland Park Farmers Market Saturday morning from 8 until noon.  If you are in Hastings, stop by and say "Hi"!