Off Mandrel Pendant

 Sometimes you get eggs, sometimes you get nothing but a bunch of shells and a mess.  The leaf bead I posted last is no more.  I had it strung on some wire for a pendant and dropped it.  The leaf stayed intact but the loop broke off.  Nuts.  I made another one and strung it with the Effetre light pumpkin one and one I made with opal yellow, and have a nice pendant I am slowly turning into a necklace.

Opal yellow is a tricky color to work with for an off mandrel leaf.  It is very soft and wants to flop around all over the place.  I committed the extra sin of wanting a notched, oak leaf appearance and chopping at it with my glass shears.  This was done with the glass very nearly cool, then I reheated the piece to fire polish it.  The resulting leaf was a bit strangely shaped, but, hey, it looks like a leaf.  The spots are Terra2, which apparently likes to reduce as well.  I didn't mean to, but it isn't ugly so I'll take it.  I also got some reducing frit in with the bordello, as evident on the orange leaf. 

The way I'm making the leaves is to make a gather on the end of the rod, rolling it in frit or decorating it with stringer,  pressing it in the leaf masher, heating the end and attaching an only slightly heated steel chopstick and cutting off the rod and forming the loop.  Then I hold the loop in a pair of pliers while I remove the punty and polish the end.  I'm sure infinite shapes are possible this way, but right now I'm stuck on leaves.  If anyone knows a better way please let me know. 

As far as my color diet, I'm retiring olive for the time being.  It is a great shade of green and truly appropriate for fall but I'm playing with apple blush until I can figure out how to get a predictable orange blush or get sick of it and give up.  I am also going to play with some CiM pheonix shortly, probably in place of the Effetre light pumpkin.

Fall (color) Diet Pictures

 I haven't posted many pictures since the weekend, but I have been working.  I really like the way the glass is acting on the new diet.  I confess to a certain amount of premeditation with the way these turned out in that I knew that many of the colors I picked were going to do neat things when I combined them with metals and silver glass. 

The bead on the left is made on CiM lapis with a twistie of copper green, CiM bordello, DH Aurae, and DH terra2, with some silvered ivory thrown in for good measure.  Believe it or not, the weird greenish stripe bordered with black is the bordello.  This, I was not expecting.  I can only speculate that the greenish color is it reacting to the silver glasses next to it and the black stripes are it reacting to the copper green with the silvered glasses.  If anyone else has any suggestions of what it could be, please leave a comment because I like it but I'm stumped.

 The long bead on the right is a base of Effetre dark red special, 1/2 rolled in silver foil and melted, rolled in a DH reducing frit blend on the other half, wrapped with the same twistie as above and silvered ivory stringer, and swirled in a couple places.

 This is where the battery on my camera died, so I had to settle for a group picture of the remaining beads.  You'll see more of the copper green stringer, plus one made with just DH terra2 and aurae, and another made with EFF dark red, light pumpkin and trans topaz on a base of clear.  I used silver foil, DH reducing frit, and silvered ivory stringer pretty liberally on all of these.  The only one that has anything different is the center bicone, which has another stringer made with a very tight twistie of CiM adamantium and silvered ivory.

I hope you've enjoyed this sneak preview into the beads I will be listing over the next week or two.

I'm going back to work tomorrow so I don't know when I'll be torching next, but when I have new beads I will post them.

Starry Night

 I finally managed to make the beads that have been haunting me for days.  I listed them last night on Etsy and am thrilled with the way they turned out.  They presented a few challenges for me, but not because they used a limited palette.  I wound up using a core of clear, then a layer of CiM lapis.  On top of that I added trails of CiM bordello and DH triton.  I melted in a layer of silver foil, reduced them, and encased this in a layer of Vetrofond clear, then added a rooster tail of black metallic.  I don't know if black metallic is on the diet but it is black so I'm counting it.

 The first challenge involved my test bead cracking.  I knew I was onto something and was frustrated by finding a small crack in the encasement layer.  I'm convinced that this was the result of not heating the bead through after adding the triton tail to the top and reducing it.  With my setup, if I heat a DH reducing color back up to glowing it spoils the reduction and I have to do it again, so I used metallic black instead.  It's not the same effect and the triton was gorgeous, but I can't have it if the bead isn't stable.

 The second challenge was one of my own making.  I decided to make the beads on a core of clear on the off chance that there was a slight compatibility issue.  Comparitively speaking, these beads take a long time for me to make, and I didn't want to waste all that time and fuel on beads I wouldn't be able to use, so just to be on the safe side I made them on a core of clear.  Then I ran into the issue of size.  I knew I wanted them as a set, which implies that they match.  Well, that means I had to use just the same amount of glass and decoration.  OK, I can do this.  Surprisingly, I didn't have to waste any beads since they did come out within a millimeter.

The last challenge is going to be letting them go.  I want to offer my best beads, and I believe these can be included in this group.  I can make another set for myself and may sometime, but they won't be these beads.

I'm not the only one who feels like this and I will be satisfied having made them in the first place.

Effetre very cherry

It seems I bought a whole lot of Effetre at once. This is a very deep red, if a cherry it's an overripe Bing. It comes out as a semitransparent, very deep red. The rods I got were about 9mm, and thus I was a little nervous about heating them, but I shouldn't have worried. While not melting as slowly as a transparent, they are certainly stiffer than the 436 dark red special, and not at all shocky. In terms of hue, I am strongly reminded of CiM bordello.

Since this is a semitransparent color, I wanted to see what it would look like self and encased. The left bead is a self spacer, the second is over clear and the 3rd over white. All look dark red and the self one is a very deep, very rich red.

With silver this color really looks cool. A hint of this can be seen on the left bead, with some bluish effects, but it really shines (literally) in the rainbow irridescence of the middle bead, which is silver foil melted in, reduced and encased in clear. Copper leaf encased in clear is not impressive.

With a nod to Pat Frantz and Dragonjools in their blogs, I couldn't wait to see what it did with DH aurae. There is no visible reaction in the 2 beads on the left, which are aurae reduced and psyche, which would not reduce for me. Under encasement aurae looks very cool blue and green and triton the same, only darker. In fact, I can't really tell what the base color is in my poor lighting.

I wanted to see what would happen over ivory and discovered two things. The first is that it doesn't react as a gold pink would by producing an ugly black spot and the second is that very cherry is a striking color. Yes, there are dots of very cherry on top of the ivory dots in the bead on the left. It doesn't do anything ugly with copper green, but I don't care for the way it looks brown over the green.



I have nothing against this color and would buy it again, but its depth of color makes it hard to find a use for. One thing to note is that it is very much easier to work than 076 striking red.

CiM bordello

This is one of those reds I just had to have. It is a bit too much of a good thing, though. The first bead on the wire is a plain self bead to see if it can be used on its own, and the answer is probably not. Bead 2 is over white and struck, looking kinda orange. This doesn't go away over ivory in bead 3, which I tried to leave unstruck so I could see if there was any reaction over the ivory. The fourth is with silver foil melted in, and it looks ok, but the base bead could be black. 5 is with silver foil melted in and encased in clear. I like the blue effect. The copper leaf bead is looking very unattractive, and it doesn't get much better in the next bead, which is encased. 8 is over clear and this is a better example if a transparent bead is desired. Wow, is this dark. I deliberately made the bordello half of this bead over white and I might as well have not bothered, since no light transmission has occurred. No reaction with the copper green, though. 10 is over white to show off the color and with silver foil melted in, and at least I can see the base bead is very dark red. 11 is with plum silver and 12 is with aurae, which is a nice combination.

I plan on more experimentation with silver glass, possibly some of the stronger lustre ones under encasement. I believe the blue reaction with the silver foil will be repeated.

Will I buy this color again? Probably not. Its darkness limits its usefulness and I bet the glass I have will last a very long time.