Thursday's Pretty Palette!

It's time once again to pick a palette at random from the Design Seeds website.  I've picked the palette randomly using a method only known to me.  I used a little bibbity-bobbity, flibberty-gibbety, and an adding machine.  I have to use an adding machine; I'm a bookkeeper and the thing is permanently attached to my right hand.  Maybe that's why I'm having so much trouble getting my lentil beads just so, the damn adding machine keeps getting in the way.

Color Chard by Design Seeds

Why do I always pick the ones that have that raspberry color?!?  Luckily, this time I have some new colors, as I spent WAY too much money at the Gathering on new glass (and THAT is a post for another day).

That green will probably be a nice olive. I'm pretty sure I have a pale, light purple.  I definitely have a red to match.  And maybe I'll bring out one of my rods of CIM's Grape Ape for that darker purple, it is my favorite purple in glass after all!  That would be nice.

Since this is the first week I've been back, I don't have any beads from last week's non-existent palette to show off.  Next week will be MUCH more interesting!

(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:

Put your money where your mouth is!

Don't you hate it when you're so broke you can't afford to buy a product to support either handcrafters like myself or big companies that follow business plans you agree with? You want to give a little something to show you care, or agree, but when it comes down to it, the groceries and electric bill are a little more pressing than that string of delicious looking beads from your favorite beadmaker or the brand new all-electric vehicle that just hit the roads.

One of the things I'm gonna do with this blog is point out which handcrafters, companies, and products I like and why. Yeah, that's sort of self-evident, given this is my blog, but I want to make a special effort to do this because: a) I'm gonna run out of stuff to talk about eventually if all I'm talking about are beads and b) since I can't afford to buy them, maybe giving them a little bloggy love will show my support. And if you, my loyal reader, follow the links and spread the word, you too will be spreading the bloggy love.  And isn't that the best way to make someone happy?

So, the first handcrafter I want to talk about in my Bloggy Love series is Laura Sparling. She's a fabulous beadmaker in England who has the quirkiest sense of humor I could possibly love. Yeah, that sense of humor might be just a standard British quirk but, being the Anglophile that I am, it tickles all sorts of funny bones in me.  And, Laura’s beads are gorgeous! If I had a million dollars, I'd buy her beads.

I discovered Laura and her beads through her YouTube video tutorials on how to do a handful of different lampworking techniques. She has very informative, well explained (and produced) videos on pulling stringer, encasing, applying stringer, adding and encasing silver wire, and striking Creation is Messy's gorgeous candy apple red, Sangre.  So, to date, she only has 5 videos, but they're all lovely, and she has great advice... (except with the Striking Sangre one. Nothing I do will get my Sangre to strike like hers does, but I blame myself 'cause I'm not cool and English like she is. Seriously, I think the glass is reacting almost as much to her voice as it is to the heat of the flame.)

Laura is not only talented as a comedienne and YouTube personality (whether unintentionally or no is irrelevant), she is a marvelous beadmaker. Her gallery will show you that her beads are both technically perfect, with adorable little bead hole puckers, even sizes, and smooth roundness, but also beautifully designed, with rich, varied color combinations and excellent taste in decoration. I envy her stringer control and play her videos while I'm torching to help with my own beadmaking. I could be so lucky to get half as good at lampworking as Laura is.

Oh, look, almost midnight and I'm about to turn into a pumpkin. So, good night, I'll most likely kill you in the morning.

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.