Tuesday's Palette

I'm a little late selecting this week's palette (from the Design Seeds website), but I think it will an interesting challenge.  (I haven't even started making beads, so the reveal might not be until Thursday, but check back tomorrow just in case.)  As I originally said, I'm selecting the palettes randomly, and this time I ended up with another fuscia!

I know I have that green, and definitely that orange.  I can't even tell if that is black or blue, second from the left.  I have a purple that's close, and I have a handful of goldenrod-like colors that might work.  The fuscia is going to be tough.

I don't think I like that combination in either the picture or the palette, but Random calls and I must obey.  It's not like I could come up with anything better using my own eye to select the colors! :)

Wish me luck!

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.

Beads from my last session...

Here are the results of my labors at my friend's house.  If my description of my color project confused you, this image will probably help.

As you can see, there are three "sets" of beads.  The bottom one is just a little fun I had with Devardi glass (if I recall correctly; I guess I'll have to ask my friend and edit this post if I'm wrong).  The top two sets are part of my color project.  You can see that the base beads of the first set is green, the base beads of the second set is orange, and supposedly, I used the same set of stringers for each.  Besides the fact that I made one less bead for the greens, it appears that the green glass of those beads reacts quite differently than the orange glass does.  It's hard to see because the lighting conditions weren't good, but there's a lot of crackling in the stringer decoration on the green beads.  But that, my friend, is the exact reason I'm doing this project: to see how the different glass colors interact.

Even though I missed making one green bead (and now I can't actually tell the difference between some of the stringer colors!!!) I consider this first session a rousing success.  It taught me that 1, mark the mandrels somehow so I know which stringer I used (or maybe keep the stringer the same and make the base bead in all the different colors), and 2, that green I used causes the stringer to go all crackly, which is an effect I like, but if I'm not trying to do it, I should keep away from the green or only do raised stringer with that color.

There's stringer, and then there's STRINGER

Still making stringer, but when I was about to start this morning's batch I realized I'd have to label the stringer for easier identification.  I have two very close shades each of orange, yellow, red and green, and even though they're distinguishable in the rod, the stringers side by side are almost identical.  So, I came up with a simple numbering system for the rods and put a little flag of tape with the number on the corresponding stringer.  This project is all about doing way more work than I have time for, so why not add a couple more steps?

As I go through and melt the glass to make the stringer, I'm trying to note differences in the glass, but I'm having a hard time noticing differences.  It's all glass, it all melts, it droops if you don't keep turning it, but I can't see many more differences as I'm melting the glass?

I did notice a difference between my two shades of turquoise.  One shade was really easy to work with, didn't melt too fast or too slow, and when I pulled the stringer, it pulled nice and easy, but the other shade of turquoise was so soft, very liquidy when it melted, I had trouble controlling the droop even though I was turning the rod constantly when forming my initial gather of glass.  Then when I pulled the stringer, the droop drooped and I ended up pulling a very uneven stringer.  That second turquoise also reduced (I think that's the word) in the flame much easier than the first turquoise, and I ended up with some copper red in the stringer.

I guess I'm just not very good at discerning the various working characteristics of the different colors, but that's what this project is all about.  Making a permanent record of how the colors interact, and hopefully through this process I learn more about how to work glass in general.

Sorting stringer...

I just spent the last few hours sorting and making new stringer.  I had to sort the stringer I had so I'd know what colors of stringer I needed to make, but damn is it hard matching some stringer to the original rod.  Once the glass is that thin it's hard to tell whether it's this shade of orange or that shade of orange.  I actually had to get Jon's help with it, but I don't know if that just confused me more.

I ended up with about 5 or 6 colors that I already had stringer for, then I turned on the torch and made stringer out of 9 more colors.  I chose the number 9 because of it's awesome significance: that's how many divots I have in my rod rest!  Once I filled up my rod rest with possibly-hot rods, I didn't want to mess around with laying additional rods on the rest and risking dropping hot rods on my workbench.  Safety tip: lay some sort of sheet metal along the ENTIRE top of your work bench, not just underneath your torching area, so you don't have to worry about hot rods setting fire to your table top, like me.

Crazy doesn't even begin to cover it...

You might call me a pyromaniac, but I like to call myself a lampworker.  I make beads out of glass.  Molten glass.  Glass which didn't start off molten, but which I put into a 2000 degree flame and melt to molten so that I can make beads.  You might call me a pyromaniac, and you'd be right.

On top of that, I'm anal.

I started a lampworking project today.  It's a project I've been hoping to avoid because it was going to be a metric ton of work with no obviously apparent benefit, but if you listen to some of the people on the Lampwork Etc. discussion boards, no time at the torch is wasted and every bead is a lesson learned.  So, with that thought in mind, and hoping beyond hope that I can afford all the glass that goes into this project, I begin.

Goal: To learn how the different glass colors interact with each other on the surface of the bead.  For a couple months now, when I sit at the torch, I've been trying to just pick a glass rod of some mostly random color and apply some stringer of some other mostly random color to see how they go together.  Problem is, it hasn't been going so well.  Either I end up always picking the same few colors (that are my favorites) or I forget what colors I used on the bead because some interactions are so dramatic they change the colors altogether.

This is how my lampwork sessions usually end up:

So I've made a plan to make a bunch of beads of one of the colors of glass I have and apply a simple decoration of stringer of each of the other colors I have to see how the color combinations work out.  I imagine it's sort of like shuffling a deck of cards, but with fire and molten glass.  In triplicate.  'Cause I'm going to do this sampling with each of the colors.  At last count I had 32 colors, so that's 32 sets of 31 beads each. How many beads will I end up with?  992!

Besides the massive amount of time it's going to take just to make enough stringer out of 32 colors of glass, I've already encountered a bigger problem.  I just ordered more glass.  More glass usually means more colors.  How many more beads will I end up with using these 4 more colors?  Mr. Calculator says 268.  *sigh*

Ok, I'll start with what I have, make a bunch of stringer, and see where it takes me.  Obviously I can't put a hold on my plans to make sell-able beads - I'd never get around to it if I just kept making color sample beads - so I'll just have to keep two sets of glass, one for the color samples and one for the sell-ables, and just spend time each day making both.  (I think I need two sets of glass so I can keep track of which colors I already made samples of.)

Torch it!