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I found a Flower Marble Tutorial on the WetCanvas site and adapted it to try to make an implosion pendant. Simply, this is a pendant where the pattern is in the centre of the glass, much like childrens marbles. Here's one of my better efforts, although not very good, but it's a start.

This bead is made from Bulleye glass, mostly yellow with yellow and blue stringer applied. It's 24 mm long and about 25mm bobble to bobble. The shape is achieved by melting a blob of glass into a bead on the mandrell and rolling it at an angle across a graphite marver plate to give a cone shape. Different colours of stringer were applied around the base to make the bobbles. The white seed beads are a right angle weave practice piece.Here's another: Inverted cone shape

These are some of my latest beads.
My latest beads: Just out from a kiln anneal this morning
I've made a number of hearts in different colours. Both the hearts and crystals are about 24mm at their widest so take a good bit of glass. The pendant is of scrap window glass with yellow and blue COE compatible frit. I've made a number of these too. The blackish bead with swirls is one of a number all the same in a set.Set of beads with swirls

While I was out walking yesterday I came across St. Peter's Church in Dyrham. Unusually for a church this one was open so you could go inside. It's probably because it's so close to Dyrham House. There was a stained glass window opposite the alter which, while not particulary impressive, I thought I could use to improve my technique of shooting panoramic shots of stained glass windows. Unfortunately, I had to set up quite close underneath the window to avoid a light fixture that was hanging right in front of the window. This has given the panel a bit of an extreme viewpoint. In addition, I felt I couldn't get a good enough angle on the windows that sit above the ones pictured below so I've missed those out. Overall, I feel this was more of a success than the last one that I took with this method. It does however show how important cleaning the windows before photographing them is!

Hey, way to go. I clicked on the Alamy link without knowing what would turn up. Perhaps you could add something like "Stock photos for sale" to the site under the link. I like the River Boyd photo. Did you submit that one to Alamy?

I won't go into the trouble I had at PC World trying to buy an exterior case for my crashed hard drive and eventually had a refund from them. I thought as a last chance and as I was in the area, I'd call into Maplin Electronics to see if they had a case for a serial ATA hard drive. They supplied me with a 3.5 IDE/SATA HDD USB2.0 Combo Enclosure from www.newlinkproducts.co.uk for £39.99. I took it home, opened it up and proceeded to join up the leads. Nearly ALL of the info is readable and some of the games still run from this now external drive. I'm in the process of copying over all the essentials and have just managed to get back all my favourites.

Below is a panorama that doesn't look like a panorama! It's a 3x3 image with two exposures blended together. It's the River Boyd in Bitton, taken from a small road bridge which crosses it. It was a good place to stop, sit down, have a drink and rest for a bit. Taking the photos meant I had an excuse not to have to pick up all my gear again and carry on! ;-)

This is another hand held panoramic shot taken from when I took my balloon ride. It's annoying blurry like the other two but when reduced in aize it looks a lot sharper.

About a week ago, our relatively new, 7 months old, hard drive crashed overnight. We've had to wait nearly a week for an engineer to come from PC World as the machine was still under warranty. He confoirmed that the C: drive had failed and fitted a new one. He tried to take the old drive aay with him but I said I wanted it to stay so he suggsted I'd have to pay over £100 plus for it but I persisted and he called up his bosses and confirmed that I could keep the old drive without paying. My reasoning was that when chkdsk was run it completed 46% satisfactorily before stopping after encountering an error, so some at least of the drive might be accessible. I'll disconnect an external drive presently connected to the computer and re attach the old drive to see if I can get anything from it .

It's been ages since I put anything up here to do with music but Whitfield's whole album is worth linking to. I've linked to one of their songs below but you should be able to get to the rest of the album by clicking the link. Their music is sort of brit-poppy and it kind of reminds me of Keane - those sort of feel good sounding melodies. You can listen to the whole album streamed online with the option to buy if you like it.