Spacer Madness

 It's been too hot to do a lot of torching this week.  Normally, I do a little bit every day and try to get listings up as they are ready.  This has not been such a week.  I decided to follow the lead of many other lampworkers and give it a rest, to cut down on energy usage and increase my own comfort.  A side benefit of this plan has been that I have had the time to go through my to-do list and actually do some of it.  Many items I have been meaning to list have been listed, including some of the countless spacers that seem to multiply as I look at them.

 Above is a set of black and white that I made with various blacks and Effetre white pastel.  The only bead I can absolutely state was made with a specific black was the white one near the center, which was made with intense black stringer.  The black stands out so well it can only be that.  Everything else might be Vetrofond black or CiM tuxedo, or even CiM hades.  I know I didn't use Effetre black, because I have never bought any.

The blue and white ones at the right were made with Effetre 060 cobalt and Effetre white.  I love blue and white and seem to have made quite a few of these.

Here are two cylinders made with Effetre lapis cobalt and one of the trans cobalt, all with white stringer.  I was wondering if I should stick to just cylinders or throw in a few bicones and rounds as well.  I'm still thinking and may modify this listing.

I wanted a blue less likely to be mistaken for black with these and went with Effetre pastel light cobalt with these.  I like the way they are still very blue but are a softer contrast.

Here are some made with CiM hades on Vetrofond dark ivory pastel.  I love the way the hades curdles and webs over the ivory.

I've played with ivory and turquoise a lot, but not silvered ivory.  I love the way the silvering takes the reaction between the two past its usual grey line and out the other side.  I'm going to try this on some of the greens as well.  I was thinking of CiM sherwood and Effetre copper green and Nile green.

These came out so awesome.  I love the way the Vetro dark ivory curdles when you melt DH Triton into it, and you get a halo reaction also that is also fab.  It reminded me of ancient writing on stone, hence the name, petroglyphs.

This is one of the new Vetrofond colors, biscotti, with scrolls of Triton which were melted in and reduced.  The Triton fumes the biscotti to a huge degree and there is another neat reaction line around the Triton.  The combined effect gave me the impression that the designs had been burned into the beads so I had a little fun with the name, smoldering runes.

The weather is supposed to break soon, so I'll be back at the torch in no time.  I might just make more spacers....

longer beads

 I've been working on some longer beads to go in the party tools I picked up.  It's quite a challenge keeping these things hot.  I am positively terrified of going to rewarm them and blowing them up.  Don't laugh.  This has happened.  I keep the exploded bead on my workbench as a reminder, as well as the chunk that landed on the seat cushion while I happened to be working from the seat.  This is the longest one I've made to date, and I didn't measure it because I couldn't find any measuring device.  They are all hiding and will in due course be found.  I had to pick a striking color because I like a challenge, in this case CiM stoneground.  The decoration is sis.

 This one is very pretty, but for this design I need more width.  I think I will wait until I have the masher to do something flatter.  The base is cobalt and the decoration is spirals of DH triton and aurae, feathered, reduced, and encased haphazardly in clear.  It is a pretty bead, but not one that works in this design.

My favorite of the lot, and one that, unfortunately, came up too short.  The base is Vetrofond extra light olive and the decoration is a twistie made from opal yellow and psyche.  I love the way the reduction on the psyche is so variable.  It really is a kind of rainbow effect.  This was a tough bead to make because the E.L.O. is really soft when hot and started to droop badly when I was applying the stringer.  As a result the center is not wonky, thanks to the marvering, but not as developed in color as I might have hoped for.  What do I want?  I very nearly had glass dripping on the table.  Some of the stringer is buried deep within this bead. 

In addition to continuing to work on my size perception (is there a way to mark the mandrel?) I have to work on getting the ends to look pretty.  Hmmm.

midnight cobalt

This is another one of those colors that only came out in limited amounts, Vetrofond midnight cobalt.  It is DARK.  I didn't even bother making a self spacer, because it is so dark there's no way it would be distinguishable from a black bead and I wouldn't want to string it into something by mistake and have it show up in bright sunlight.  It melts slowly ans remains pretty stiff.  It doesn't shock easily.

1 is a spacer over clear and 2 is over white.  3 is over white with silver foil melted in, then reduced.  I had noticed this effect with standard cobalt and wanted to see if it did the same thing.  It does.

4 is a test to see if applying silver foil, melting it in and reducing it brought out the blue.  I was surprised to find out it did, just barely.  5 is the same as 3, encased in clear.  I was sorry to see that the effect wasn't really preserved, but there is some lightening of the blue.  6 is over ivory with ivory dots.  The blue is so dark it's hard to see if there was any interaction between the 2.  I don't think there was, based on the crispness of the edges of the ivory dots.  7 is with copper green and nothing changed on either side.  8 is with turquoise and nothing happened here either, but I got a nice thin dot on top.  This is an idea--use the color to place over white on a cobalt blue bead so the dots on top of the white look as intense as the base bead color.

I like the way 9 turned out.  It is dots of TE-331 with clear dots on top of half of them.  I didn't make any special effort to strike the TE-331, and wouldn't you know it, it is my best color reaction to date.  I wonder if I can do this again?

Would I get more of this glass if it were available?  I don't know.  The glass I have will last a long time, since it is really only visible in very thin layers.  It would be good for fine stringer work or in murrini but that's about all I can see using it for.  I can't make murrini so pulled cane and over other colors is about it.

Frustrations in photography

The difficulty of posting photos of my stuff is beginning to perplex me.  I keep saying (to myself still, thank God) why doesn't this look like the beads?  The answers to this are as complex as why the glass does what it does.  Add to this very little skill in actual photography or composition and I am frustrated as heck.  Colors look different against each other.  Dragonjools posted about this with a link to a site with magenta, orange and turquoise.  Colors look different with different light sources.  Witness the flower necklace pictures.  Colors look different with different cameras and monitors.  Where is the bead in this?

Above is a some fairly pretty beads using a base of 220 periwinkle and my miserable rose cane on the left and 256 dark pink opaque on the right.  We shot these on about 20 different backgrounds and this is the only one that showed what the colors even looked like.  I remember during school pictures the photographers sent home instructions on what colors to avoid when sending the kids to school on picture day.  Now I know why.  Surprisingly, the beads on the right, which I am calling pebble beads, look best on a sand colored background.  My friend Carol, who was taking the pictures, wished we had some sand to take the pictures on because they reminded her of pebbles too.  I suggested the cat box but that was turned down for obvious reasons.  We settled on the underside of a lid from her crock collection.Two of these are ivory with silver melted in and the middle one is CiM stoneground  with silver melted in and ivory dots topped with EDP.  I don't know whether I liked the way the ivory turned all black or not because all the spots did the same thing.  The EDP looks nice, though.

 I have another hundred photos of these beads against various backgrounds.  The top bead is Effetre 213 grasshopper and copper red green stringer, the middle one is copper green with a complex stringer of turquoise, cobalt and grass green opaque, and the bottom one is copper green with a copper green red stringer.  These changed color the least, but were the most difficult to photograph at the time.

Copper green red.  Beautiful if badly named color.  It probably is copper green changed in some way to produce the reddish tones, but the copper green turns turquoise and the red turns magenta.  The necklace beads are self copper green red and black spacers and the earrings are vetro black feathered with copper green red stringer.  The amount of color adjusting this photo took was stupefying.  Usually I just white adjust and save.  On this one I had to white adjust, normalize, hue and saturation adjust, color balance in all three levels, then white adjust and normalize again.  To get it to look like what the bead looked like in the first place.  The beads on the white candle were just white balanced.  Go fig.

more test photos

I didn"t like most of my test photos, and while I haven't had my stuff photographed well yet it has been photographed by me, better than it was before.  For instance this necklace was a green and blue blur last time I photographed it, and with the macro setting on the camera and the colors clarified, it almost looks like it does in real life.  It even has the color interaction I like pretty well depicted.  The glasses used are again peackock green and cobalt. 

The bracelet is one I've been wearing to work for months and finally decided to take a decent picture of.  The coral is Effetre coral streaky sherbet, there is some opalino carnelian, and the trans orange is Vetrofond arancio perfecto.  I used dark red stringer on all.  I like the color variation of the dark red when it is mixed with the coral, but the bead with the red bumps looks like it's oozing drops of blood.  I don't know whether to say neat or gross.

This necklace I didn't dare show in my earlier picture since it was blurry and the colors were miserable.  The spacers are plum silver dark, the sky is copper green red and the ground is moss agate.  If these colors don't look right to you, it's the bead.

These didn't show up very well in an earlier post.  I sorta have the camera and software working for me now and I like the pictures a lot better.  The beads are the same.  Now they went and changed the format for this blog.  Figures.  Just when I start to be able to figure out where stuff is going to come up it changes.

some beads

This necklace looks so much better in real life, both because it is in focus and you can see the wave pattern on the focal and because the frosted glass just doesn't hold the light the way it does in real life. The blue is Effetre cobalt and the green is CIM peacock green, etched. There was a color interaction you can't see in this photo on the focal. In the center of the stringer a silvery line formed when I melted the cobalt in. I think it looks a little like white caps.

Here is a necklace I made from powder pink with light ivory and goldstone stringer. This glass was really fun to strike, and I don't think it went very well on the small beads. The color of the focal was a surprise but more what I was expecting all along. The teapot earrings are Effetre white, cobalt stringer and commercial pewter bead caps.