(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!

Time flies...

Wow, I can't believe it's been a week since my last post!  OK, down to business.

I've been making beads, lots of beads.  Little itty bitty spacer beads, huge (by my standards) focal beads, and experimenting with all sorts of other stuff too, like silver foil, silver wire, ivory, my new lentil press, the ribbed marver, and layering different colors.  Some of that stuff, like the silver foil and the wire, I worked on tonight, so I'll post about my first attempts with silver foil tomorrow when they come out of the kiln.  Tonight I'm gonna talk about ivory and making focals.

Day before yesterday one of my coworkers was wearing a green dress with a cobblestone pattern on it, and it suddenly hit me that I could make a bead FOR the dress, for my coworker.  I saw a bead in my mind's eye, and went home that night and tried to make it.  I got close, but I think it needs some silver, maybe a fancy bail or a chain, or maybe even silver directly on the glass.  It was hard enough just to get it to somewhere resembling the shape I was hoping for so I just left it plain.  I went ahead and gave it to her the next day, hopefully she wears it with the dress.  I don't know if I'll ever know, 'cause I've noticed that woman has so many different outfits I don't think I've ever seen her wear the same thing twice!

The bead:

The dress:

Is that cool, or what!  It took forever to get the shape even and symmetrical, and no, those aren't the same thing. The bead was made with CIM olive, some brown that I haven't identified yet, and dark ivory.  I have no idea who the dress was made by.

After making that bead I thought, "Oh, I like ivory (the whitish color on the bead), I should use it more often," and proceeded to make another couple beads with ivory:

Ivory burns really easily, but it makes a great streaky, curdly effect.  I added a bit of silver wire, which, when melted, results in these little drops of silver on the glass.  It makes a great effect, both on the surface and when you're encasing.  I'll show some encased silver wire tomorrow.  This bead was made with Vetrofond Jupiter Odd Special something-or-other, and dark ivory raked along the equator of the bead, and that's it!  Simple, yet elegant.

I was wondering what would happen if you made raised flowers out of ivory, so this is what came out of that curiosity:

Sorry about the focus, this was my camera phone.

Turns out, the ivory is very soft, so you don't to heat it much to get a good groove with the tungsten pick or whatever tool you're using.  Usually I have to heat the petal dots so much I end up melting the bead below the dots, and pressing too far with the pick.  This bead was made with the dark ivory, green grass transparent, and I think CIM pumpkin for the stamen.

This next bead was meant to be a barrel shape, but it sort of got away from me and ended up being a marble with slightly dimpled bead holes!

This was my piece de resistance!  Raked and curdled dark ivory over violet, ribbed on my ribbed marver, encased in transparent purple, and premium dark purple bookending the whole thing.  My boss took one look at that this morning and claimed it for herself.  And then in the afternoon she asked for matching earrings, which are sitting in the kiln right now.

So, my daughter's in love with Kipper the Dog, a British cartoon for kids.  Emma also loves my beads, so I thought I could combine the two and attempt to make beads of the characters.  I started with the baby pig, Arnold.  Emma won't notice how wonky his eyes are, and I can always make more!

Isn't he adorable?  No?  Kinda freaky looking?  Yeah, I think so too!


Oh, and I even organized my stringer:

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.

It's here! It's here!

My Devilbiss 515 oxy-con finally arrived, and after a little hiccup we got it up and running with my new Nortel Minor torch that arrived a few weeks ago.

OMG this is such a world of difference, so nice! I love how quickly the glass melts, and with the new CG Beadroller I picked up, (the Donut Spacers, BR-1301), I can make a bunch of spacers quick and easy.  You can see it hiding behind the torch in the above picture.

While I was waiting for the the oxy-con to arrive, I put together a glass storage rack for all the new glass I've been acquiring, and the glass cataloging project has continued.

I've changed the catalog system a bit, but I'm hoping the new system will work better. Those sharpie numbers I wrote on that batch of sample beads I showed a picture of earlier all got rubbed off, so I decided to use little little price tags on strings to thread through the bead. This way, I can label every bead I make so I don't forget what colors I used on them.  Now that I've got the torch and oxy-con set up I've started making sample beads of all the colors of glass I have.  Yeah, still OCD about stuff like that.  Maybe I should seek help. :^)

I'm really happy with the first results I've had with the new setup.  The Minor burns so clean and hot that I haven't had any trouble with soot, glass burning or bubbles.  I was even able to get Electric Yellow and Carnelian Opal to strike!  I've heard people say that compared to an oxy/fuel torch the colors you get on a Hot Head are duller and the glass is less shiny, and I think I've actually seen that about the "shininess".  I know when I'm taking the beads off the mandrel, the new beads are more slippery, even when I'm using a towel.

Since today is Sunday, my husband and daughter are going to a friend's house to give me some free time to torch, and I'm going to see what I can do about practicing stringer work.  Yup, I'm obsessed with perfecting my stringer work, and now with the hotter Minor it's like I have to learn how to make beads all over again.

Glass Storage - The Undiscovered Country...

There are too many colors, too much glass, too many choices... How am I ever going to come up with a way to store it all?!?

I wish there were an "easy" button for decisions like this.

I'll edit later with the different options and a discussion of them.

Much later...

Oh, I almost forgot to edit this with what we decided to do.  Here's a pic of the space...

We'll be putting something along that tall thin section of wall there, just above the back of the workbench.  If I I better make it modular, in case I ever get a kiln that I'll be putting there.  That thing that looks like a mailbox on the other side of my hot head is a mailbox KILN.  Jon and I built it and it's currently gas (see the fire) so I'm hoping to convert it to electricity in the not-to-distant-future.

The thing we'll be putting along that wall will look something like this (hopefully less messy) or this (nice and neat!).  Either way, I'll be happy to have my all my glass in one place. :^)

So, not much discussion, but at least I was able to make a decision about something!