Kickin' Ass and Making Beads...

I've been making beads quite regularly for a couple weeks and I'm really proud of myself.  I even have pictures!

These beads were made from bottle glass.  Yes, they are strung on a paper clip. :)

I made these adding a bit of silver and frit to fancy them up.

#1, 3, 5, 6 and 7 are a champagne bottle. #2 is, literally, some random broken glass I found laying in the grass next to where I parked my car at the park yesterday. It was VERY thin glass.

#1, 2, and 5 - I wrapped in 32 gauge fine silver wire. 

#3 - I wrapped in silver foil, burnished with my graphite marver, then just torched the *bleep* out of it, and THEN I put a couple wraps of the fine silver wire on it.

#6 - I rolled in frit, um, Sedona something or other. Bottle glass is a lot harder than 104, so I had to have the torch up so high and the bead so close to the torch tip to get it to melt, that the frit literally swam molten over the surface of the mostly-hard bead. It was eerie. The colors are very faint against the dark green champagne bottle glass that I'll need to try other colors of frit to find some that actually stand out.

#7 - I made silvered ivory stringer for the first time and made a few melted in scroll designs on this one. Again, the ivory melted much easier than the bottle glass so it flowed more than I wanted to, but the effect isn't completely undesirable.

A couple days later I made some more bottle glass beads:

Here I used frit and bottle glass stringer.  I have to be careful how much frit I use because some of the frit beads are cracking because the bottle glass and the frit glass are two different coefficients of expansion, and therefore incompatible.

When I get bored practicing the same thing over and over again, I just make something random, like this:

And then I decided to try making plumeria flowers.  Plumeria is a popular flower for making leis here in Hawaii.  The yellow bead is just the bead I made when I got tired of practicing plumeria flowers. :)