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.

Effetre apple green pale

This one is a color that doesn't do it for everyone, but I happen to like this as a base for other things, and in the case of the dark bead, the neat thing it does with tuxedo and silver foil.  Kelp did the same thing and since kelp is about the same color, I think they may be different shades of the same color.  The first bead is plain.  One thing I'm noticing is that on the clear beads, no matter how I scrub the holes, there are bubbles in the glass along the mandrel that look like there's still bead release there.  Some of my opaque beads are so smooth that the inside of the holes has a mirror polish, but not the clear ones, naturally.  So ignore the white line through the center.  The 2nd bead is encased over clear and the 3rd is encased with clear.  I had to hold them over a white envelope on their sides to tell.  The 4th is with ivory and the 5th is my favorite, a base of tuxedo, with silver foil melted in, and encased in the apple green.  I tried this with light brown transparent, but no neat turquoise reaction.  I can't explain it.  The last 2 beads are with silver foil melted into the apple green transparent, on the last on its own and on the one before it encased in clear.  It turned brown but I thought it might.  Other than that, no fireworks.

I've been asking myself if I would buy more of this color and for this one, I want some to have but won't stock up for glass armageddon.

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.

New colors

Santa came again and dropped of a whole bunch of glass and a lens press. I am now learning to use all of these and the results are variable. I got some wierd color combinations and some lima bean looking beads but I think I am on the right track now. For now.

1. CiM pheonix, as unstruck as I could make it. I did make this on the same mandrel as bead 2 and flashed it in the flame a few times, but I wouldn't have thought it would have struck to the extent it did. Only around the holes is it a peach color.
2. plain and struck
3. being taken over by SiS. I knew I would like this combination. Next lesson: learning stringer control.
4. with DH aion2, encased in (I think) CiM clear. I was hoping for that orange and purple thing, which I will probably never be able to duplicate with a more readily available color. I got grey.
5. with DH triton, encased and mashed with more success than I thought. A little overfill on the press but I think I got the general shape the bead has to go in right. Now I have to figure out how to encase so I don't get all that clear on the thin edges.

With any luck at editing this blog, what follows are some beads I made with Effetre kelp, 080(I think). I wanted to try it primarily as an encasement color for silver and silver glasses but this has suggested all sorts of other lines of experimentation so this may or may not have been a good idea. The beads are as follows:
1. plain
2. with silver leaf, melted in
3. with silver glass, triton, I think, encased in clear
4. over CiM tux, melted in, reduced, and encased in kelp. I like this bead.
5. tux with triton, reduced and encased in kelp
6. tux with silver leaf, encased in kelp. The kelp went semitranslucent on this. Not my favorite bead.
7. tux with silver leaf, encased in a thinner layer of kelp and mashed. A bit better. Note the brown reaction.

I made a few crocus unique beads, I forget which unique, I'll look it up, and decided I had to try it against the original crocus, which I think I like better. Or I like the beads better, at any rate. The original has very few, if any color reactions that I've found yet, although it was hard to reduce old faithful triton. Here are the beads.
1. plain
2. with silver foil, melted in
3. encased in clear. Fritpedia suggested encasing it in Reichenbach clear, which I do not have, so I tried CiM clear. It's not doing anything for me. I'll have to try it with the Reichenbach, if I get some.
4. With DH triton. Note the lack of silver color on the triton. Ignore the misshaped lentil.
5. with triton, reduced and encased. This turned out a bit better.
6. with silver plum dark scrolls, finished high in the flame. OK.
7. with copper green. No reaction. What? a color that doesn't react to copper green?

Here is another color I had to try, seeing that spring is almost here (what a laugh) and I need a pick-me-up. These were made with Vetrofond banana cream odd lot.
1. plain and unadorned. What a nice sunny color.
2. encased in CiM clear.
3. with DH triton stringer reduced and encased in clear. I didn't think I would like this, since thinking of this and silver glass did nothing for me. I am glad I tried it, because it's my second favorite of the bunch. As far as color combinations go, regarding technique, did I mention I sock at encasing?
4. with sis. What was I thinking? I'd blame the drink but I was sober. I am noticing that encasement and color reactions lighten this glass. Interesting thing to know.
5. with plum silver dark, finished high in the flame. Nice contrast, but I don't know if I would want a set of these.
6. with effetre turquoise 236. Less of a grey line than I was expecting. I like this combination.
7. with copper green. Again, not a whole lot of reacting going on. Pretty combo.
8. with EDP. My favorite combo. I didn't think I would like it, again, but I'm thinking pansies.