Playing with pictures

 Today I went over to my friend Carol's house and we played with her excellent digital camera.  To be more truthful, she played with the camera, and the lighting--note to self, get a task with Reveal incandescent bulb, the fluorescents sock for photography-- and I watched and handed her beads from time to time.  Even without the macro lens, which is actually a macro telephoto (there's an oxymoron), and tripod she was able to take pictures that put my meager efforts to shame.  The animal print beads pictured here are OK in my pictures, but here they show exactly which glasses I was using, for instance ivory vs. dk ivory and that the brown batch of strawberry sweet I got hold of really is reddish.

I should really see what the silver based gold tones do on ivory, btw.  I really like the leopard print and tiger stripe beads I made by encasing a light color like ivory with transparent amber glass.  It adds a whole lot of depth to the bead.  I don't wear animal print clothing or decorate with this style, but it has design possibilities, especially with the earth tones I seem to be wearing more of.  Also, I like leather cord as a stringing material because it doesn't require a lot of skill to string and is easily replaceable if it gets ratty.  For this bracelet it's nearly mandatory.

This necklace is one that one of my friends found very amusing.  It is of powder pink, struck inclompletely in the smaller beads.  I had thought that powder pink was more of an earth tone, based on the compact flourescents that I use exclusively since I am a klutz and am always knocking over lamps and popping bulbs.  With the incandescent lamp the pink tones come out and the necklace actually looks much better.  I've posted this one before, but never with this degree of clarity.  The decoration is ivory and goldstone stringer. 

 This bead rocks.  It is Effetre dark ivory with aurae stringer, melted in slightly, struck and reduced.  The aurae fumed the ivory yellow, which really does a lot for this bead.  I am going to do more of this in the future.  This I like.

This is a set of party tools that I couldn't resist today.  I had to put them together just to see what they looked like, with some beads that I had lying around that were roughly the right size when combined.  I think the posts the beads are mounted on are interchangeable in some way but haven't tried fooling around with them yet.  It might be easier to make beads to fit them.  The bottle opener and stoppers are mixed silver glasses over dark opaque glass, encased in clear, and the spread knife is a center bead of partially silvered CiM stoneground flanked by two of my favorites, a core of CiM tuxedo, silver foil melted in, a thin layer of Effetre kelp and a thicker layer of clear.  They have a kind of dark green iridescent quality that I find very appealing.

I posted this necklace before, but it remains one of my favorite color combinations so I'll shamelessly post it again.  The green is Vetrofond oddly odd lemongrass, the purple is CiM poi with small dots of Effetre dark amethyst, and the clear is Effetre super clear.  Yes, I've mixed three manufacturers in each bead.  Nothing has cracked.  Yet.  I didn't know whether I liked the dark background or the white one better so I'm posting both.  Notice the quality photography on this one.  The camera matters.

Finally, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, this is the purple flower necklace, backlit and tweaked so some of the details are visible.  No, this picture doesn't have a purpose that I know of, since I am highly unlikely to use this as a suncatcher, but a really thickly encased set of beads with backlighting was too intriguing to resist and with digital photography we weren't worrying about wasting film.