strawberry pink

 These earrings I made using the newer version of Vetrofond strawberry sweet odd lot and rose cane with Effetre pale pink special and Vetrofond arancino perfecto odd.  They were just listed on Etsy as I can't resist this style of earring. I also like the different tone produced by using different colors in the rose, though this isn't quite the peach I was looking for.  Maybe the banana cream for the opaque?  I need a pale yellow and don't want to use ivory because of the potential reactions.
 Quite a difference between the 2 batches of strawberry sweet.  The first makes a good earthtone and the second, in the picture below, seems more of a pinkish coral in the bead, if not the rod.  In the small beads this is not as apparent, but I wasn't building up as large a bead as with the lower one and the inner layers didn't come up.  Both look different in rod and bead form and both are unusual shades of pink.  What else to say?  I am keeping a little of both lots, since this color looks like it's going to vary a lot and who knows what's going to come in next time I order this glass.

I've been working on getting test beads for more colors, but my attention seems to be wandering from one color to the next and don't seem to want to do too much of one color on the 30 minutes or so I have on the torch before the gas cylinder frosts up and the pressure drops to the point where I worry about the flame staying hot enough to work or even going out in the middle of a bead.  This is a problem I seem to be having a lot as I try to stretch out my working time.  Cindy Jenkins suggests switching tanks or immersing the bottom in warm water but the prospect of gripping the hot Hothead and putting it on a fresh cylinder doesn't appeal any more than sitting with a bucket of warm water between my knees to soak the bottom of the tank.  Either way threre's going to be some sort of accident.

hearts and flowers today

 Valentines Day is coming and in celebration of this tribute to candy companies and jewelry merchants, I am making beads devoted to hearts and flowers.  I am happy to report that I have had some success, at least as far as I am concerned, with this.  The first bead on the mandrel is a case in point.  Effetre copper green red, with leaf and rose designs.  The shape of the bead may be a little off the perfect donut but the roses came out very nice, and the leaves are well shaped, too.  Could I be getting better at stringer control?  Probably the law of averages and dumb luck.  The other 2 beads on this mandrel are of the pinker version of strawberry sweet with the same rose cane and leaf stringer application, not quite as successfully.  I think the strawberry sweet, while pinker than the downright earthy version I got initially, is still too orange to not clash with the pink roses.  Next experiment:  peach colored roses.  This is acually why the lower picture exists, since the flash I used  really brings out the orange in stark detail.

On the right is my very first heart bead, made with Effetre rosewood.  I really like this bead.  The indentation on the top of the heart is not as pronounced as it could be, but the other side is deeper and I really like the color swirls on this side.  I'm more into color than hearts.  I haven't tried to make a horizontal hole heart but I imagine the overall process is about the same.  Kind of like glass sculpture for dummies.  I wonder if this book is out yet.  If not I'll have to copyright the name before anyone else thinks of it.

A few posts back I threatened to do a comparison between the machine pulled version of silver plum dark and the handpulled version.  Surprisingly enough, they do act the same.  The bead on the left is the machine pulled version, and the one on the right is the one made from the few rods of hand pulled conicle that I have lying around and I got cheap.  The reason it is not pearlized as much as the machine pulled version is that right around when I was making this bead was when I noticed the crockpot starting to smoke, and voila!  This bead was done.  I normally don't use a flash for the pictures that I am posting because it makes the colors all washed out and distorted, but in this case, it really brings out the lustre on the beads.