(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!

Anticipation... is keepin' me way-ay-ay-tin!

I haven't torched in a few days, and while I'm craving gettin' my torch on, I'm also looking forward to having a new torch, with oxygen, and hot fire, and melty glass, and happy happy happy beads!  Well, technically, in the popular vernacular a "happy bead" is a bead that's been properly annealed, but I'm sure they're much happier beads to begin with if they're made an an oxy/propane torch instead of a Hot Head.  I can't wait to get my hand on that thing and just mold the glass rods into beads in a perfect oxygen rich flame.

And once we get the torch up and running, I'll start making so many beads I'll have to get the kiln electrified, 'cause I don't think that Jon is going to be none too eager to put a plumber's torch in that thing again.  Considering what happened the last time, I wouldn't blame him either.  I'll test my theory tomorrow and push for annealing the batch we were going to anneal last week.  We'll see if we can get to Ace Hardware early enough to buy a good hose clamp, so we don't have a repeat of last week's debacle.

The update for today on "the project" is a picture showing what I decided to do to label my beads.  I've heard of people using little price tags on strings, or organizing them in boxes, or even writing up note cards with pictures  (which sounds kind of like the thing I would do), but I decided on a more direct approach.  It all starts with a numbering system.

I have assigned a number to each color of glass I have.  The assignation is random, I just picked up a glass and said, "You will be #1."  I marked it with a sharpie (which I'm discovering will need some reworking because the sharpie rubs off if you handle the rod too much) and pulled a stringer or two from it, then marked the stringers with a piece of tape on the end (like a flag) and numbered with the same number.  Then I made a grid:

1,2	1,3	1,4	1,5
2,1	2,3	2,4	2,5
3,1	3,2	3,4	3,5
4,1	4,2	4,3	4,5
5,1	5,2	5,3	5,4

If I were (un)lucky enough to only have 5 colors of glass, I would be making 20 beads (ah, the bliss!).  The first number is the color of the base bead and the second is the color of the stringer.  But, using the grid as a checklist only helps if you can then subsequently identify the beads you've made against the chart.  That's where the next picture comes in.  I'm so clever!  I made this image so large so you could see the detail.

The sharpie works to mark the glass.  You'll see B16 on the bottom; that means that the base bead is made with color 16.  On the top you'll see an S5; that means that the bead was decorated with stringer in color 5.  These are the same beads I showed pictures of the other day at my friend's house.  Two colors of beads, and 8 colors of stringer.

And now, before the next huge batch of glass comes in, I'm gonna go organize the glass I already have.  Baby and Hubby are asleep, so I get my "me time" -- starting at 11:19pm.  Oh yay.

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.