Anyway, I thought I would tell you about my latest experiment.
A friend of mine made me the most wonderful beaded necklace with a glass eye cabochon as the centre piece. This then got me thinking, eye cabochons.
I did a bit of research and found some glass dolls eyes on eBay, but they were something like £7.00 a pair. Gulp. I was looking for something a wee bit cheaper so I could resell to my customers.
After a lot of emails and a bit of haggling, I found a factory in China that made dolls eyes. It took a good few emails for me to get across what I wanted - oval, flat back, glass, no wires.
Well, I obviously didn't do very well as I received round with stems on the back - at least they were glass!!
First of all I had to use my rod cutters and snip all the back off as close as I could get them.
Unfortunately I couldn't get some of them quite as close to the back as I would have liked, so they didn't all sit too straight in the kiln. Never mind, I thought, the odd wonky one will be fine :)
All night they were in the kiln, and I didn't peep once.
In the morning, I threw open the lid and ...... whey hey....... eyes!!!