(Late) Wednesday Lampwork: Tuesday's Pretty Palette Bead Reveal

Sorry for being a day late with my promised Wednesday blog, but this issue is bigger and better for the delay!

If there's one thing Tuesday's palette has taught me, is that I need more colors in my glass stash. But don't tell my husband, who would have to start giving up his sections of the bookshelf where I keep my glass. :)

But seriously, I couldn't accurately match several of the colors in my glass supply, and when I got down to trying to match them at home, on the living room computer monitor, the first color shows up as more of a green and the second color shows up more of a beige.  The next two colors are pretty identical, the brown is chocolaty brown and the fourth is a deep mauve which I don't have except in transparent (so tempted to use my last remaining stringer of a glass color we call EDP - more on that in a future post), and the pink was much lighter, very faint.

So, here are the colors I chose for this palette from Design Seeds:
1) Creation is Messy Celadon
2) Creation is Messy Butter Pecan (sorry, don't remember which unique variety, I think the -5)
3) Vetrofond Brown Dark Special
4) Rubino Oro (this was a gift so I don't know which manufacturer)
5) Creation is Messy Chai Unique -3

This palette is far removed from what I normally come up with on my own, and I really enjoyed challenging myself with it.  Usually I stick to blues, greens and beiges, which can be a VERY limiting palette, but, considering how few beads I've actually made in my life, I do think I still have a lot to say with that palette.  THIS palette on the other hand, was a push for me.  I didn't want to just make flowers, like the orchids that inspired the palette.  I wanted the colors to speak to me, sort of just let myself go, and I started by winding a few rounds of the butter pecan glass onto the mandrel and then winding on some of the brown dark special right next to it.  I melted the two glasses together into a rounded doughnut, and suddenly I saw, please don't laugh, a chocolate covered doughnut sitting on my mandrel.  (My friends would laugh because they know my lifelong obsession with chocolate doughnuts, and it's ironic because I'm REALLY trying to stick to low-carb right now.)  Once I saw that, I had to add more frosting (celadon) and some sprinkles (rubino oro).

Oh, I'm so hungry right now!!!

Then I decided, heck, if you're gonna have doughnuts, you might as well have ice cream!

Don't you just wanna lick it?

Once I made those two beads I made an army of spacers.

The brown looks SO dark in this picture!

That was Tuesday night.  Ten spacers and two fun beads does not make for a very interesting blog post, so I decided to make more beads on Wednesday night, and I came up with a bunch of adorable glassy cuties!

Big-Hole-Bead Worm, with badly applied lipstick. :)

A couple rubino oro encased lentils and a round butter cream bead with chai over celadon over brown layered dots .  Look at the chipped hole on the lower rubino oro encased lentil, that's never happened to me before! So sad! :(

Then I decided that a flower or two wouldn't be so bad, as they're one of my specialties.

Not too partial about the mint chocolate look, but doesn't that
rubino oro stamen dot look like a pink diamond? SOOOO pretty!

 All together now:

Not pictured separately are a couple other big hole beads (upper left and bottom right),
and the chocolate lentil with green scrollwork and some dots (bottom center).

See?  Wasn't it worth the wait?  Since I have a week before the next blog post, I'll get started on the palette and the beads now.  Sometimes, the only way to combat procrastination is to go completely the opposite direction and do something WAY too far in advance.  Next Wednesday is 4th of July, so everyone have yourselves a safe and sane holiday!  (Oooh, maybe I'll just make 4th of July beads instead of randomly picking a palette...)  Either way, I'll announce the next palette on Tuesday!

Experimenting with Reduction Glass

A local friend of mine was kind enough to give me some reduction glass and frit (reduction and regular) for my birthday last month and I finally got the nerve up to play with it.  I've read so many Lampwork Etc. threads about how to use reduction glass so I thought it would be intuitive, but I was.  I tried the frits first, including 3 of the reduction frits, setting the propane way up high and just bathing the beads in the main portion of the flame, but the reduction frit beads all turned grey.  Happily, all the other frits turned out really nice, though.

Seeing as how those three beads aren't *really* what I was hoping for, I broke down and did a Google search and found these instructions on the Arrow Springs website on how to use reduction glass.  Since I had a whole rod of reduction glass from my friend (Reichenbach Iris Orange, R-108), I decided to just make bead after bead after bead until I got it right.  This is how the next batch of beads came out. Aren't they pretty?

Just so you know, I used the "second method" as described in the fourth paragraph of Arrow Springs' instructions.  When you're done reducing your bead, remember when you turn your oxygen back up that you have to do it really slowly, because the build up of oxygen in the line with cause a loud *pop* as it mixes with the propane and possibly blow out your propane flame.  It might be better just to turn the propane all the way off and then turn your torch back on using the POOP method (propane on, oxygen on; oxygen off, propane off).  That *pop* scared the bejeebers out of me even when I knew to expect it! :^)

I don't see myself buying any Reichenbach for myself in the near future, and I only have an inch or two left, so I'm thinking of turning the rest of the R-108 into stringer to stretch out that awesome oil-slick effect over several more beads.  I'll be sure to post some pictures of those experiments when I get around to making those beads.

Getting down to business...

Whew!  Summer is over and I'm back to my blog.  After my last post I continued learning how to make beads with my new torch and oxygen concentrator, and now I'm feeling fairly comfortable with both.  The Nortel Minor is just a dream to work with and I'm not afraid of it anymore.  I find myself just turning it on and running with it.  It's a great feeling to have decent tools.

That's a CG Beadroller living next to my torch!

I'm experimenting with different bead designs.  I've added raised flowers to my repertoire and my raised scrollwork designs are actually getting better every time I make them.  Also, I've made a few cube beads, which look pretty cool with melted-in scrollwork.  Someone even said the design looked kind of Hawaiian, so that'll be something I have to work on to perfect so I can add it to my stock.  Here is a set I made last week:

 

The search for the perfect glass organization method continues, and now that search has extended to beads.  I'm making so many beads that I'm having trouble keeping up with it.  But this problem is a great opportunity to get more of my sh*t in gear so I have a better and easier time when I finally start selling my beads.  To help me keep track of what colors are in each bead, I got price tags on strings to attach to them, and then I ordered a cardboard box for storing collectible cards in order to have a place to keep all the beads.  When that comes in I'll put it all together and take some pictures. Here's what I have so far, but I only have one of those plastic trays and the cardboard box was cheaper than the trays for the number of beads I could keep in it.

 

As far as the glass rods are concerned, I've been doing pretty well with a milk crate full of 1.5 inch PVC pipe cut to 10 inch lengths.  I did just order another 8 and a half pounds of glass, so it will be interesting trying to fit that in, but that's what the debit card is for - more PVC & more milk crates.  I'm looking forward to getting this new glass but after last time, spending HOURS tagging all the glass I currently had with labels, I'm thinking this next batch of glass will only be spot tagged.  That was way too much work!

See all the little tags?  Crazy tags!  LOTS OF CRAZY LITTLE TAGS!!! :)

Development on the homemade mailbox kiln has ground to a halt.  We have all the hardware we need, kiln brick, we even cut the kiln door open, but putting it all together has been really difficult.  I don't know why, but I just don't have patience for this project, probably because it feels like it will be impossible to get it done right.  The hardest part has been drilling through the box from the top to install the element support wire.  We broke two drill bits.  Yeah, they're crappy drill bits from Harbor Freight, but after spending all day slaving over the kiln then having this happen, I just threw up my hands in disgust.  Every step just felt harder than it should have been.  Luckily, we didn't spend a lot of money, just $12 for the mailbox and a few bucks for the hardware.  I don't like to give up on projects, but I truly believe this mailbox kiln has me beat.

So, what do we do when we can't make something?  We either do without -- which has become impossible because my bead-breakage rate has increased now that I'm making more complicated beads -- or we pull out the debit card and buy something:  Devardi's Professional Mini Bead Annealer.  Looks like a god-send, I'm really looking forward to it.  It's a curling iron warmer that has some extra electronics added to it to help you control the temperature and bring the temp of your beads down slowly enough to anneal them.  Priced at $76 (plus $15 shipping), it seems too good to be true, but I bought one and I'm going to make it work for me.

An impossible task...

So, you might have been laughing at me for the last few days because you realized something I didn't really get until today, but this color sample project is not gonna fly.  I just bought yet MORE glass today, another 25 colors!  If I stick to this project religiously, I'll be making color sample beads until my 2 year old's grandchildren are having grandchildren!  I don't even think my calculator has enough digits to figure out how many beads I'll have to make with all the glass I want to buy.  So, yeah, color sample project put on hold.  What do I do now?

Well, with all this glass I'm going to be buying I'm going to need a way to store it!  So, off to the research races.  Some people at LWE have been using this to store their glass.  While really nice looking, I'm not accustomed to storing my glass laying flat.  I'm not saying I won't do it, I just never have.  But then, I've always had about a pound and a half of the stuff, so it's not like I needed much of an organizational system before now.  And we just got done building new upright pvc glass storage, too, but it barely fits the 3 pounds of glass I have now, let alone the 7 pounds I just ordered today.  Oh my, 10 pounds of glass.  What WILL I do with myself?!? :)

The reason I splurged and bought so much glass is because Creation is Messy (CIM) is discontinuing a host of their colors, and a couple of my favorites were in that list of soon-to-be discontinued colors.  CIM calls their glass "Messy Color".  I just love that, it makes me want to eat it!  Or run my fingers through it.  Or something otherwise obscene!

When I checked out the Frantz Art Glass website to buy some of the colors, one of the favorites isn't even listed, but the other was, and since I hadn't bought any of that yet I decided to buy a pound, and then 1/4 pound of all the others that were going away soon.  Frantz Art Glass has awesome sales, and these discontinued colors are about 60 or 70% off right now.  I hate Frantz Art Glass, they make me spend way too much money!

In case you're curious, my favorite color is blue.