Venturing out

In a bid to start widening my world, my friend Julia and I went on a lampwork beading workshop a few weeks ago. I found the class on the Craft Courses website. I have done several workshops booked through them in the past and they have all been excellent. We travelled by train to Sheffield and I must admit that I did feel very uncomfortable on the train as it was packed out. We had managed to book a weekend in Sheffield on the same day that Norwich City were playing away to Sheffield United so the train was full of football supporters armed with what felt like a whole brewery's worth of beer! I wore a face mask for the entire journey and used antibacterial hand gel liberally! We arrived in Sheffield in time for lunch and found a lovely cafe very close to where the workshop was held. Another first for me, eating in a busy cafe but the food was delicious. I had the 'French toast of the week' which had spiced plums and ginger creme fraiche and tasted every bit as good as it looked.

The workshop was brilliant. It was just the two of us so we were hands on the whole time. We learnt how to melt the glass rods and add the molten glass onto the mandrels (these are the 'sticks' that you make each bead on - they are coated with a substance at the end which allows the bead to be released once it's cool.) Then we were shown how to create different patterns by adding other colours of glass to the beads. I am really delighted with the beads that I made and would love to have another go. Our beads were posted to us a day later as they had to be annealed to prevent chipping and cracking. The first photo shows my beads and the photo below shows Julia's collection.

It was a really fantastic weekend but it took me a week to recover from it! Then I had a week of infusions and needed another week to get over those. But it was definitely worth it. And I didn't catch Covid either! xxx