Sunday, December 29, 2013

More silvered ivory

I've been playing around with silvered ivory, this time with light ivory and turquoise.  In a well known reaction, light ivory forms a black line when it meets turquoise, which can be used in designs.  I thought it would be interesting to see what effect this reactions would have been silvered ivory was laid on top of the intersection point.  As you can see in the photograph, it darkens the junction, thus accentuating it:

I've raked across the junction in one or two places, then made a twist and added a cubic zirconium.  The middle bead is made with Nile green, which undergoes the same reaction with ivory.  Expect to see these soon in my Etsy shop:  etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Purple and pea green earrings

I've been busy with Christmas preparations, cards, church bake sale and holiday bazaar among other things, so my bead making has suffered.  I've been experimenting, but nothing concrete.  One thing I have accomplished, however, it to make earring to go with a new top I made.  The material is colorful:  purple, pea green, orange, fuchsia, black and white.  I figured that dots would be the best way to incorporate all these colors in a single lentil bead.  So I made a base bead of white, a little smaller than my lentil press and placed dots of black, pea green, eggplant (CIM 655), EDP (Effetre 254) and Tangerine (Vetrofond 939) to cover most of the white bead.  The results are shown below, along with a scrap of leftover fabric:

The EDP had to be heated in intense flame to prevent the devitrification reaction, which was only partially successful, but I don't think it looks that bad on these beads.  The bead on the left has spots of Effetre Pink Stripe (253) instead of EDP.  I don't think it looks very good over white, it seems more apricot than pink, but by itself it produces quite a nice deep pink---more on that in a later post.

I've got a pair of earrings.  A necklace would be lost in the colors of the fabric, but a bracelet might be a nice accessory.