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 Lusherie".

I was thrilled 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

2011 is turning out to be an amazing year for me.  In February I moved into my beautiful new home studio, and am loving creating and teaching in there every day.  Also in February, I was 'all over' Making Jewellery magazine.  In April I was given an amazing opportunity by Tuffnell Glass to be a demonstrating artist at Flame Off 2011, the annual UK lampwork festival - what a huge honour, and how very scary it was!  Read more about these experiences in my blog.  In May I finally got to visit Venice and, more importantly, the glassy island of Murano where I was very lucky to take classes and spend time with more glass addicted people from all over the world.

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.