Its all about Me ... welcome to my glassy world!
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My name is Julie Fountain and I live in the beautiful Worcestershire town of Malvern, famous for its carefully protected Hills, spa water and ridiculously steep high street! I started lampworking in August 2007, and I'm still so excited to be able to show you some of the beads I've made in my home "studio", aka "The Torch Porch". |
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Then they are carefully annealed in my digitally controlled kiln and cleaned (and occasionally given a little extra treatment for a lush matt finish).
I discovered lampwork beads when I was designing and making my own jewellery, so I originally started out making beads for use in my own creations. I now enjoy making beads just for the sake of making beads, and make much less jewellery now - but I do occasionally indulge in a little stringing and crimping, I love to mix lampwork beads with semi-precious stones and pretty silver spacers.
I am incredibly honoured to have been chosen by my peers as February 09 Artist of the Month on Frit Happens forum. So if you want to know more about how I got started in lampworking, what inspires and influences me, take a look here
I've had a number of lampworking tutorials published in Beads & Beyond magazine, worked on a joint collaboration with my friend George Harper-East for Making Jewellery magazine and am thrilled to frequently spot my beads being used in various published projects.
Don't forget, all my beads are handmade, handcrafted, handshaped, handmixed, handformed ... so there will inevitably be some variation in sets and some of my beads are unrepeatable one-off creations - but I do tend to prefer reproduceable styles, so if there's something in particular that you'd like more of, just let me know and I'll see what I can do.
I don't always manage to add new beads to the website as often as I'd like, but I'm constantly busy in the background, torching every day, stocking up for Bead Fairs and completing custom orders. Please do keep an eye on my Flickr album to see what I've been up to recently, and add your name to my mailing list so you can be amongst the first to know when new beads are available.
If you'd like to learn how to melt glass and make beads too, check out my Tuition page. The team from Beads & Beyond magazine recently had a really enjoyable day melting glass with me - you can read all about it in the October 2009 issue, and in their blog here
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