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.

First Beads for Fall

 I made these Saturday, before I officially decided to change my color diet. In fact, these beads helped me to see that it really was time for a change.  Apparently, I'm not the only one because 3 of the 4 sets I made up are on their way to their new homes.

Of the batch, the beads on the left are my favorites.  They were made with CiM lapis with psyche and sis.  I love the way the ivory fades into the lapis.  I don't think I noticed this in my initial testing, but for this set it really works.  Besides, the blue violet is such a lovely color.

 On the right is a set made the same way with CiM olive.  This one reminded me of an aerial view of grass-covered sand and streams.  These are the most fall-like colors so far, but green is a lucky color that works in any season.

I called this set water flowers because of the colors and patterning, primarily.  The lentil is copper green with sis like the spacers, but I added a blend of 456 rubino oro and CiM cranberry pink dark frit.  I love the way the pink frit reacts with the copper green, separating it into a halo and an area that looks almost like it was thinly encased in aqua transparent.  I was also surprised to see that the pink picked up some of the silver from the stringer it contacted and moved it to its far edge.  I don't know who could have predicted that.

I'm not an orange person.  I tend toward cooler colors and shy away from ones that make a bold impression like these beads do.  I have to say I like this one.  I like the way the streaks of blue, purple, yellow and pink show up against the plain coral.  The glass I used is Vetrofond petrified wood and it's not on the diet, but that is primarily because the glass is so pretty on its own that I can't see adding anything else to it.

Naturally, the beads I made yesterday were useless.  I did make one that looks good, and another that was probably the prettiest bead I've ever made.  The good looking one is a base of light pumpkin with silver foil, sis, and psyche, decorated with bordello bumps.  I'm going to play with that combination more.  The really pretty one was too pretty.  I wrapped a core of lapis with trails of psyche and bordello, rolled it in silver foil, melted it in and reduced it, encased it in clear and decorated it with half a triton swirl flower.  Unfortunately it looked so good after I reduced the triton that I didn't want to mess up the reduction by heating it too much and it cracked from thermal shock.  The two halves are still together and it looks like the crack only goes partly through the encasement layer, but I can't use it.  I hope to come up with a solution to this problem.

New Diet

I haven't been sticking to my color diet, and the reason is that as I'm starting to gear up for fall the colors in it aren't appealing to me.  Above is a new palette I'm going to try out.  Melanie Graham, in her Mind Melt blog, got me started on this, and it is a good idea, because it stretches my creativity and allows me to go in directions I wouldn't have thought to.  I will start out with this palette and work from it for exploration, but I'll switch out colors if I find that I have run into a wall on them.

The colors I will be starting with are

1. CiM olive
2. CiM lapis
3. CiM bordello
4. Effetre light topaz transparent
5. Effetre light pumpkin
6. Effetre kelp transparent
7. Effetre light brown transparent
8. Effetre dark red special

I can use, in addition to the above colors, black, white, clear, copper green, ivory, opal yellow, adamantium, silver glasses, and metal.  I may also schedule for myself a holiday or two.  I know, for instance, that I want to play with Effetre apple blush.  I could put it down as a replacement for another color but I don't know which, if any color will retire.

I should have some pictures of beads made with the new colors starting tomorrow.

Finally

I was so thrilled with how these turned out I couldn't wait to post them. I couldn't even wait to clean them, so please forgive the mandrels and bead release. They are both heavily encased and decorated in or on the encasement, and they are both on the diet! I can stick to the diet and still produce beads that I can use for a project, as long as it's the right project.

On the left is a base of CiM tuxedo, encased with CiM clear, decorated with a twistie of copper green and CiM Slytherin and a flower or two of CiM poi stringer encased with ink blue. On the right is a base of CiM poi, encased with CiM clear and decorated with dots of the copper green and slytherin stringer. I really dig the way the poi shifts by encasement with the ink blue, and also the way the copper green and Slytherin react with each other. I think the combination works with the plaques better than either color alone would have. Who knew?

For a double shot of my beads on the Creation is Messy site, and to find out more about poi, click here for CiM.

I couldn't just make 2 beads, so I dipped the clear in the DH reducing frit blend I had made and made a fritty bead with this. The glasses were Aion2, CE 352 (when it comes into production it will be Calliope), Aurae, Triton, and Psyche. The Psyche didn't reduce, but everything else did and looks fascinating under the clear. Now I'll have to make more of these, which will mean making more frit, so I can do something with them.

Confession time. This is off the diet, but I couldn't resist using some CiM Sherwood to make the beads on the right. On the left is plain, middle with a wrap of a Triton shard, and on the right is encased with CiM clear and dotted with poi. I love the way the Sherwood is still a bit streaky under encasement.

Ever notice the way your state of mind affects everything you do? Yesterday was a good day and everything went right. The beads turned out the way I pictured they would (when does that happen) I finished in time, and the weather even cooperated today with just the right amount of sun so I could take some decent pictures. I'm going to quit while I am ahead. I have a doctor's appointment today and am hoping to get back to the day job so I can buy more glass again.

One more thing from yesterday: I found a studio near me, about an hour away in Booneville. I didn't get a chance to look into much about it and, frankly, don't have the money until I go back to work to do anything about it, but at the same time, the prospect of taking my first class or two and using a proper torch is scary and intoxicating. Here's the link to their website, and they also have a Facebook page which is how I found them.CNY Glass Studio

Scratch One

These are the last 2 beads I'll be making out of this twistie. I like the color that the Aion2 turns when you reduce the heck out of it and cook it, and the copper green flower (?) makes it look like the twistie is ending or something, but for the amount of effort involved, I'm not sure it's worth the bother.

No one would ever be able to tell, but underneath both these beads is CiM slytherin unique (dark) and a wrap of silver foil, melted in and reduced, like everything else. I wrapped the twistie so heavily around that the bead that the bead is encased.

The Terra 2 entirely failed to strike but there's some weird milky stuff going on under the clear the twistie was wrapped around. Could be the Terra giving it a go. the flowers were not really all that recognizeable because I melted them in too much. Not much else to say except that slytherin doesn't mind some very thick encasement and it gets along swimmingly with silver glass.  To see what other artists have to say about a fantastic color and see my blog hit the big time click here for Creation is Messy.

This one I consider a fail not because of the Terra 2, which struck nicely in spots, but because of my miserable technique. I was concentrating too much on not doing bad things to the color of the twistie, which was already suspect and didn't pay attention to the ends of the bead, and then in a hurry to finish the bumps so I didn't melt them in as much as I should have. Not much to say except sloppy and yet another learning experience in the category of not sacrificing the basics for the extras.

I made a few beads today and I think they actually might have come out pretty well, or at least better than these did. They go with my green aventurine plaques that I posted last time. Can't wait to see what I find in the morning.

What was I thinking?

There were almost no pictures for today's post. I had stupidly removed the memory card from my camera in preparation for uploading them and then allowed myself to become distracted. Oh, is that a baby dragon?..........................................................................................................................................................

I do have a spare and could have just taken the pictures again, but that's not the point. A lonely little memory card the size of a postage stamp has no chance at all around here on its own. Either something hot will drop on it and melt it, or I'll crush it under my chair, or the cat will puke on it, or it will simply join the host of socks, money, jewelry and, yes, postage stamps that I will swear are around here somewhere but I will never see again.

I had a little argument with myself, lost, and decided I had to get organized. It was after about a minute of cleaning off my desk that the desire to avoid housework focused my mind to an extent no other threat could and I located the memory card. Huzzah! I can post.

The pictures above and below are the final ones in what I am calling my art nouveau set. Above are ink blue on the left and ghee on the right. I have already had a problem with ghee cracking, so I kept the encasement light and built the bead on a core of clear. It was later that I discovered that for whatever reason, Effetre's oliva nera seems to have the same problem. I picked up the dish to photograph these last night and discovered the oliva nera one was cracked in half. Black olive is a transparent color so shouldn't have a problem like this, but just in case I made another one on a core of clear and filed it away for future reference.

I really like the oliva nera bead I made late last night, risking the annoyance of my neighbors. I think the shape turned out very well even though I overfilled my lentil press in a way I haven't managed before. If this very stiff glass was any softer, it would have squirted all over the place. The black olive is on the right, with slytherin on the left. From Mind Melt's blog, I knew slytherin likes silver and silver glass, but it does some really great things. It was when I was looking at my photographs that I realized that the silvered ivory reminds me of pen and ink art nouveau work and coined the name for this set.

The bead I made with Slytherin is my favorite in this favorite set of beads, and it got me top billing on CiM's website.  Click the link to see what others have to say about this underappreciated color.

Here's the whole set. Slytherin is at 11:00 and I'll go clockwise from there. Slytherin, oliva nera, ink blue, poi, pearl grey, coral Martian strata, poison apple and ghee.

All jesting aside, I really am going to get some housework done now. I shouldn't be this disorganized.

the diet continues

I've been working on a limited palette and having a lot of fun with embellishment. I've stumbled upon a combination that pleases me and will be making a set out onf the resulting beads. First, I am melting in silver foil and rolling in homemade DH frit blend, then applying a twstie of Psyche and opal yellow and an odd swirl or two of silvered ivory, then mashing. What is changing is the base glass. I've done Martian strata, poison apple, and now poi and pearl grey.

CiM poi is on the left and Vetrofond pearl grey odd is on the right. Both colors reacted nicely with the silver and silver glass by becoming less grey. Poi develops a warmth that wasn't present in any other combination I've tried so far and pearl grey becomes a sort of semitranslucent olive. The bubbling appearance of the sis continues. None of the pictures I've taken so far shows how the psyche struck, but I'm hopefull I'll find a way to do this by the time I have the set finished.

I am halfway through my palette with ink blue, ghee, oliva nero and slytherin left to go. Three of these colors are transparent and one's an opalino type. Can't wait to see what this does.

Hopefully the doctor will release me to return to work next week. I will have no time to torch then, but that is the tradeoff.

To see my discovery on CiM's site and find out more about this amazing color click here

color diet success

As I am beginning to get used to the color diet, it is getting easier to work the beads. The one on the left is the final, successful bead with ghee, silver foil, mixed DH reduction frit, and a twistie with copper green, Terra 2 (still striking), Triton (not striking) and slytherin, which is very thin indeed here. I finally made this one without cracking by encasing a clear core with the ghee and then decorating it from there. Everyone had to take a look at it at the demo, although it didn't sell. I could have sold it for $3, but I wasn't going that low for a bead I spent a long time working on and that I haven't even tried to sell elsewhere yet. If I still have it in August I may have reduced the price, but I don't think I'll go that low.

These are a couple of nice ones made with a similar technique but slightly different colors. The one on top has a base of CiM poison apple and on the bottom is Effetre coral Martian strata. Both were rolled in silver foil, then the reduction frit. I applied a stringer of DH psyche and yellow opal, melted it in, then applied sis. I am thrilled about the funky way the reduction frit from 2 layers down expresses itself on the silvered ivory. I know it is this and not the stringer because other beads I have used this exact stringer on didn't do it. It is kind of pebbly or bubbly in appearance but smooth in texture. The combination of silver and silvered glass really changed the color of both base glasses as well, which was a surprise. I was in such a hurry to post them that I haven't cleaned them yet, but they will be making an appearance in one form or another on Etsy.

I haven't checked out what the kiln fairies left from yesterday but I have high hopes from the pearl grey. Maybe I'll do something using a similar decoration on multiple color base glasses for a funky organic bracelet...

there's good news and there's bad news

The success I had on the blog yesterday left me anxious to try the bead again with modifications, namely making a DH reducing frit blend, substituting Triton for the reducing glass and Terra 2 for the striking glass, and replacing the sis with plain ivory. I managed all three and even got better striking on the Terra 2 and the silver foil/frit underneath to show a little (the frit blend on top of foil pits a bit, by the way). What I forgot is that sometimes encasing yellow glass causes the bead to crack.
The bead was successfully made and annealed and removed from the mandrel. There were no thermal issues. I was holding it in my hand preparing to clean it and I felt and heard a pop. I was then holding 2 pieces of bead, cracked not along the hole but diagonally across it. I then remembered that yellow glass and opalino are both notorious for being difficult to encase. Ah. Back to the drawing board.

I did have one small success. Giddy with the good luck I had the day before striking Terra light, I decided to make a bead out of Terra 2 and see if it would strike. And it did! It's the one on the right. The one next to it is the end of the rod I made the twistie from, as a way of doing something interesting with the glass and leaving a clean end for next time.

color diet day 3

I would like to thank Melanie Graham of the Mind Melt blog for getting me involved in this challenge. I have so far found my level of creativity being stretched and my technical abilities as well. It is said that a poor workman blames his tools and I am very ready to assign my lack of expertise to the beginner setup I work with. I have a HotHead torch and use 1 lb. canisters of Mapp gas due to the limitations of working at home, but as witnessed by Sarah Hornik, among many others, this is not an excuse for producing lousy beads.

Per Jed at Double Helix, I shouldn't be able to strike non-reducing colors of DH glass with my HH without reducing them to mud. I have always found this to be the case. Just as I am getting the barest hint of color, the bead turns all tan or grey and stays that way. Perhaps because of the small, thin quantities of glass involved, but more likely because of the colors that are surrounding it, I got a blush out of the Terra light I used in this bead. It is most visible at around 1 o'clock on the top photo of this bead. This bead was made using the suggestion from Melanie's comment 2 posts ago. I made a twistie of copper green, slytherin, Terra light and Psyche and used it on a base bead of ghee that had been wrapped in silver foil and aurae stringer (I have to make a DH frit blend). Neither the silver foil nor the aurae shows much except for flashes of metallic lustre amidst the stringer. I think I'll use Triton to make this stringer with next time rather than the Psyche, because this is difficult to reduce and I'm already fighting to avoid reducing the Terra. Most of the Terra used in the stringer did reduce to mother of pearl, which gets lost in the photos. That is how I can tell that the blush of ruby was the Terra striking and not the Psyche really thinned out. It is mother of pearl on all the edges and creeping into the center of the reddish area.

Next time I make a similar bead, I will use less sis or do it in a different manner. It is just too out of place the way it looks now.

Another thing to note is that the Slytherin actually gained some transparency and shows green rather than black when made into the stringer.

Yesterday I blogged about a bead which I over embellished. Here is how the bead should have turned out. Well, I managed to smear the floral under the encasement, but I love the way the progression of colors on the petals looks and the Aurae dot in the center struck beautifully. It looks like a little galaxy in the center of the flower.



Finally another picture to show how daylight affects the appearance of the bead when photographed. I am beginning to think that if a bead has any degree of red on it at all, I need to photograph it in natural sunlight.

Second day on the diet

OK, this diet has lasted about as long as anything I've been on involving food. Surprisingly enough, I actually had an idea! The name Martian strata inspired a spacey kind of theme for this bead, and I think it worked for a change. The lower half is Martian strata with CiM ghee and black olive spots, and the top half is ink blue wrapped in silver foil, which was melted in, then a 3 petal poke flower in ghee, pearl grey and poi was applied, twisted and elongated a bit, and the top half of the bead was encased in Effetre super clear.

What in life ever turns out as you originally plan it? This didn't either, but I can't say I'm not nearly delirious with how it did turn out. It looks so much like some funky alien weather phenomenon I'm just going to say I planned it that way!
I think I would have liked this second bead if I had left well enough alone and not gone and messed with it. The copper green dots over the encasement were just so over the top that they ruined what would otherwise have been a very interesting bead.

I started out with a base of CiM slytherin, then applied silver foil and melted it in. Two 5 petal flowers with pointed petals with the following dots in order: white, ghee, poison apple, pearl grey and poi. Encase the whole thing in clear and I'm looking good.
Decide that it's boring and put some polka dots on with copper green, and by the time I'm on my fourth dot, decide I don't like the way it's coming out.

Decide I can't quit now or it WILL look like a mistake and finish going on the same theme. It wasn't a mistake, it just wasn't a good idea.

I've already made another bead which is essentially the same and will find out what it looks like. Hopefully lots better.

First Beads on the Diet

This is going to be a great challenge for me because it is stretching my efforts beyond my comfort zone. I generally make very simple beads, focusing on one technique in one color scheme. Now I am trying to play with color more and simultaneously keep basic skills under control, such as shaping. On the first bead, I obviously still need work on this. Using the photo editing software is something I thought I had down as well, but while there may be a way to combine 3 or 4 images into one uploadable block, I haven't found it.

This first bead is a base of half Vetrofond pearl grey and half Effetre ink blue, with some overlap. On the top half of the ink blue I applied silver foil which was melted in and encased in Effetre super clear. I have Vetrofond clear and CiM clear, neither of which I am fond of. Instantly forgetting that CiM poison apple loses its definition under encasement, I attempted to make a flower from it and the result is that strange item you see on the bottom of the bead in the second picture. 2 simpler flowers (CiM ghee doesn't work well for this, does it?) and voila! My first learning experience on the color diet.

My second bead still didn't come out exactly as I envisioned it, but at least I like the shape. It is a base of ghee, which went brownish for the first time since I've been using it due to the amount of time I spent working it. I applied a very thin stringer of CiM slytherin, which I believe is always going to look a slightly transparent black, and then it got all arty and stuff. I wanted there to be a purple layer to the poke points, made with CiM poi, but used too small a dot and wound up with a line of indeterminate color. Opal yellow was the next layer, which I thought might work well with the ghee, and then CiM poison apple, which I planned to look transparent. The final touch were flowers, made with poi stringer encased with ink blue for a little more complexity and to shield any potential reaction between the poi and ghee. My flower shapes seem to be a shade better.

So, what have you learned, Grasshopper. I still have an awful lot to learn.