Here comes the sun... in six short hours!

I spent the last few hours running color tests of my reds (or at least as many as I had prepared mandrels for).  That makes 17 beads in one evening.  I think it's *almost* a record for me.  Reason I ran these color tests is that I made a few beads last night with a glass that looked the perfect shade of valentine-heart red, and when it came out of the kiln it was distinctly brown.  Now, I'm not going to worry about whether or not I had the right torch chemistry or kiln environment for this glass, or if I should have melted it slower or faster.  I just want to find the right color so I can make some beads for a friend to give to his fiance next week, and I don't have time to muck about with experiments.  At least, not those kinds of experiments.  I mean, seriously, I have about 30 different colors of red. I might as well take advantage of that and MAKE 30 different beads.  If he doesn't like them, then I can use them in a neat "shades of red" set.

My workbench with all the carnage of red glass.  I'm not a neat freak, I swear.  I just cleaned up so I could find all the red.

As promised, the meat of today's post is about the cigar boxes.  It's good to have a handy person around for these, and a power tool or two, but if not you can always cheat somehow.

My grandfather used to smoke cigars, and while the smell of the cigar boxes brings back all sorts of mental images of him from my childhood, mostly the smell just gives me a sense of well-being as if I've come home.  It's so amazing how our sense of smell works.  But, that's a topic for a totally different blog!

I present to you, the cigar boxes.

The handy part comes in when you open the boxes up.  My husband cut two strips of cedar to the right length to fit inside the box and then cut grooves halfway into one edge of each strip spaced the height of the inside of the cigar box.  When you lay the strips into the cigar boxes and shove them to the sides, you can set bead-laden mandrels into those grooves, and those beads-on-mandrels will always fit, because you can't put over-sized beads into the box and close the lid.

I haven't done it yet, but I'm going to attach a piece of ribbon connecting the lid to the box so that it will just sit with the lid open, like you see here, but without the other cigar boxes holding the lid up.

This is what I used to use to store my beads. I'm still using them for my spacers.  It's a nightmare getting the beads out, and there just aren't enough spaces for all the different colors of spacer beads I want to have on hand.  You can see my most recent batch of spacer beads in the bottom left corner, just waiting for me to buy another spacer bead box like this one.

...

I forgot how much I like listening to the radio while I'm making beads.  Tonight I set Pandora to the default Rock station and sang out loud to almost every song.  Oddly enough, there was a HUGE run of Beatles, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr songs all in a row, and then interspersed with the rest of the songs, to an over 50/50 ratio.  Like now.  Paul McCartney, Live at New York City, singing "Blackbird."

Is that me?  The blackbird singing in the dead of night?  Sure feels like it, it's after midnight and I'm still writing.

Good night, I bid you Peace.

Low-tech for the win!

I hate cleaning my beads.  I hate removing the beads from the mandrels.  I hate getting the Dremel out.  I hate grinding away at the bead release in the bead holes for what feels like hours on end, the vibration of the Dremel numbing my fingers into insensibility (redundant much?).  Sometimes, the diamond bit even chips the glass at the bead hole, and that really pisses me off.  Someone once suggested that my beads chip because I'm cleaning them before they're annealed, so now that I have the kiln I thought, "Great!  No more cracking beads!  No more chipped holes!  My problems are over!"

Guess what.  Didn't work.  The worst chipping ever was after I annealed the bead.  I'm so sad about it, I didn't even take a picture to show you.  Just imagine a cute light green big-hole bead with brown-red dots and the bead hole with radial chips taken out of it.  Reminds me of the chips taken out of the edges of arrowheads my archaeologist uncle used to show me.  Difference between the arrowheads and my bead is, the arrowheads are supposed to be sharp, my bead hole is not.

So, I'm putting some of my newest beads away tonight and I noticed that I still haven't cleaned them.  Probably just a Freudian mistake, right?  Not wanting to pull out the damned Dremel, I suddenly remembered another option.  Last year when I was out shopping for cigar boxes to store my beads (more on that later, probably the next post now that I think about it) I found a packet of really pokey pipe cleaners.  I remembered then that a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, before I'd heard people extol the virtues of Dremels and diamond bits for cleaning beads, I used pipe cleaners.  But!  The pipe cleaners I used to use were wimpy, soft pipe cleaners and worked for naught.  These new-fangled pipe cleaners were hefty, had pokey needles sticking out of them, and were $2.50 per hundred.  I plunked down my milk money and stuffed the pipe cleaners in my bag... sadly, never to be seen or heard from again... until today.

So, to make a long story short, I found the pipe cleaners, cleaned some beads, and this is what came of it.  If you can't tell from the pictures how awesomely clean the beads are, you'll just have to trust me.  The flash seems to reflect a great deal on the inside surface of the bead hole, greatly diminishing the magnificent clarity of the holes.

Same bead.  Left one has bead release - right one does not.   Yeah, not much to see here.

Now, these little gems might be better...

Yup, a little better.  You can almost see through the bead hole edge-on.

And here are my saviors!

BJLong Pipe Cleaners.  I know it says "80", but really it has a hundred in it.

Oh, and by the way, I burnt myself in an unmentionable place this evening while torching.  A shard of almost-molten glass popped off the rod and landed right in my cleavage.  *YOWCH*  Not wanting to drop the bead I was working on, I asked my husband to dig it out but he couldn't find it.  After it stopped burning, my skin still kept getting irritated but I couldn't tell why until my torching session was over.  Turns out the piece of glass MELTED the inside edge of the piping on my low neckline and the glass was stuck there, scratching me that whole time.  Looks like a rash.  I wear low necklines all the time ('cause it's so freaking hot here!) so I wonder if anyone will notice.  I bet I'll have people staring at my cleavage all day tomorrow.  Well, that'll be a change.  Whoohoo!

Come back tomorrow for another harrowing adventure with Lyssa in "The Gathering Flame"!