Eye Eye

Oooooo it's been a long time since I blogged - naughty me!

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!!

So, how to get them flat.  Luckily I have a kiln, so I set to work.

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!!!

They weren't too wonky at all, a success of sorts  :)