Angel in progress

I just made a little post in the 'Creative Scandinavians Blog', about this lovely lady:


Wings are new to me, but I like it :)

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Bead Pictures!

Well, here we go :)
First, the shapes that will live after being cooled down in my new Japanese annealing bubbles, even when quite large. The ones on the right are the ones that look like Sue's ATC.


Next - dots.
Love those plunged bubbles.


My newly discovered love - drop beads. I will glue a bail into the hole and they will be quite nifty. Some are based on Ivory,


some on nice swirly odd lots from Vetrofond.


Some of them have been shaped further.


These ladies are all made with just a hole at the top. I look much forward to seeing one finished and on a chain. I have only silver bails, so I suppose I should get some sterling chains, though a black rubber cord would be lovely too.
The 3 ivories in the top row are the angel experiment I did, the 'baby-arm' godesses. I have already made a better one, but I don't think it would hold up to being a pendant, so I'll experiment further on making the wings more solid.


That's all for now.

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Something new!

I finally got into my workshop with my new glass this weekend, and the first thing I wanted to do was one of my 'things I'd like to try'. I used my beloved Effettre Ivory, a dollop of my new Vetrofond odd light amber and a bit of Vetrofond odd lot Cosmic Storm stringer, and I went ahead and tried my hands at my first off-mandrell piece.

Now this is something completely different from making beads on a mandrel. In stead of inventing the wheel all over again, I decided to try a heart. It is quite possible I should have made just a little bit of research, but instead I just jumped in with both feet. I heated a blob of ivory on the end of the rod, added globs of amber and twirled a bit of Cosmic Storm around it.
I squished the whole thing fairly flat, heated the appropriate area and made a cut diagonally across from the rod and halfway through the disc. This makes 2 pointy ends that when heated ends up as the 2 round top parts of a heart. The center and pointy end of my heart were a bit skinny, but it didn't occur to me to add more glass as I were ballancing the hot mass trying to avoid melting the rod too much and losing the whole thing.
I also tried to poke a hole through the upper center so the heart might be hung when finished, but when I poked from one side, the hole from the other side would close up and just show a little point where it had been. So I gave up on that, and now I have a small heart to decorate my home in some fashion.
Not a raging success, but definately fun, and definately something I will try again.


Front and back. Yup, it's tiny :)

I also made a few beads in black and white, much like this one, which I haven't done in a long time, and some more of the jupiter spacers. I think I have enough now for the necklace I am contemplating, my first planned project. Now I need to work on some teeth beads so I can have a bunch available for my shop, they always sell fast :)

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