Epiphany! Lampwork glass beads for Mardi Gras

Well, today is the first day of the Mardi Gras season, aka Epiphany. The season always begins on the same day- the twelfth day after Christmas, no matter when Mardi Gras actually falls. Of course you know that Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring. And Ash Wednesday is 46 days before Easter- the beginning of Lent. Well Mardi Gras (fat Tuesday) is simply the day before Ash Wednesday. The whole mess lasts right from Christmas to Easter, with some of the days for celebration, and some of them days of moderation.



If you want to know more about all of this, you should visit this site- it has loads of info about everything from the Mardi Gras Indians to Pete Fountain's Half Fast Walking Club- well at least I hope they include that! No Mardi Gras morning would be complete without a bunch of extremely drunk men walking by, attempting to play music, and kissing everyone in sight at 5:30 am or so...
http://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/mgdates.html

Lampwork glass beads for the holidays

Happy Holidays all of y'all out in the blog-o-sphere (is that right?) I've been working on some big ol' beads this week, and a few glass icicles. I've made a few fish, a couple of birds, and some interesting shaped beads to hang on my tree. In order to keep them from getting lost in the shuffle, I decided to go large and see what happened. So here are the results of that experiment.

I have been asked a number of times over the years whether I can make beads bigger than I generally do, and I always say no. But I suppose I must admit that I was wrong. The answer is- we'll see. If these hold up, maybe next year I'll make some in time for some other folks to enjoy them on their trees!

I've been working on a special request again this last week. Thought I'd just post a couple of pictures here. I've been remiss in keeping up with my blog- again!

And another kinda scary bead- I got a book on matroyshka out of the library- very intriguing...

Pricing bead sets

I have recently decided to try making and selling sets of beads on etsy. Mostly small sets of spacers at this point. I made several sets, timed myself and my bead cleaning buddy, and then tried to figure a price. Who ever thought that would be the hard part.

I figured that, with the time involved, expenses, etc., I would need to charge about $4-5 a bead. Hmm, that meant a set of five small spacers would be about $25. That sounded a little high, so I did some searching on etsy to see what other folks were charging. Surprise! Spacer beads for $1 to $2.

Now I'm not exactly a math whiz, but when a set of beads takes about 25 minutes to make and you charge $12 for it, that doesn't seem like it could be cost effective in any way. Sounds like a lot of money? $24 an hour? Are you considering supplies, gas, paypal and etsy fees, income tax, and the time it takes to photograph and list those beads? If you look at all of that, I'd say you might just as well cut that income in half- $12 an hour is really not that great a wage. And that wage only applies if you can sell every bead you make at the price you set.
So my bead sets are priced in between what I feel they should cost and what others might sell for. They are a bit more complex than those beads that are less, so I'm hoping that will be a good selling point. Guess I'll just have to sit here on my hands and wait to see what happens!