Tie Score

 I'll show the good beads first for a change.  I really like the baking soda beads that Andrea has been making at Powers Art Glass, so I decided to give it a try with different colors and textures.  I found that different glasses react very differently to baking soda.  All look super-etched, but some look like they've boiled on the surface and others do not.  In addition, the metal salt used to color the glass comes out in some of the colors.  Pardon the color of these pictures.  I wanted something positive to say and took these on the end table with yellow artificial light.

 I would be hard pressed to say exactly what is in the left 2 beads in the photo above.  I had a bunch of stringer and twistie lying on the bench and pretty well applied it all over a base of clear.  These look wild.  The second 2 on the top picture and the left 2 on the middle picture were made with a twistie of tux and peace wrapped around a core of clear, then the space between the loops filled in with silvered ivory stringer.  I would be wrong no matter what I said the right 2 beads are in the middle picture.  Copper green was involved.  And some odds and ends of twistie and such from the bench.  I seem to think I made a twistie of CiM chai unique and DH aurae that isn't on the bench anymore.  I'll have to check the floor, otherwise it's either in these or the first 2.  I think it was the first 2, because these have a green cast that I think comes from the copper green.

Transparent glasses didn't do much for me using this treatment.  They seem to be "harder,"  to use a vague term.  In these, the baking soda just looks like a heavy etching.  The feel of the top bead on the left is odd, kinda soapy.  Underneath it on the left is bordello, which looks ok.  CiM adamantium with silvered ivory looks pretty cool, but you can only see the top here.  Effetre kelp is pretty boring as well.  Ivory pastel over clear is very boring indeed.  I thought it might do something neat since it's so soft and prone to boil anyway, but no, it had to behave itself.  I can't remember what the top bead on the right is, but I'm thinking odd lots of stringer.  The one underneath is as cool as it gets.  It looks from here kind of like a pierced pea, but in real life it looks like carved rough green turquoise or something.  It is a stringer made from copper green striped with CiM olive and wrapped more or less randomly over a clear core.  The last bead is just olive.  It looks ok but does not do anything weird.

 Can't put it off anymore.  The shoes aren't happening.  I've been trying to make a shoe that's daintier and more foot-shaped and by reducing the glass around the mandrel and shaping it too close to the mandrel, every bead I've made has cracked.  These three are the most intact.  The one I'm holding (together) held up through cleaning and I was going to photograph it and try to reproduce it, but I noticed a whitish line across the instep.  I applied a little pressure and the bead snapped in half.  I can make these shoes as chunky and heavy or not at all.  Rats.

Here's the pile of shame.  Note one of them even has a stilletto heel.  It couldn't hold up, though.  Back to the drawing board.