Christmas is coming

I heard my first Salvation Army bell ringer of the season last Friday, so that's my sign that I should start thinking about Christmas beads.  I love the smell of pine bough wreaths, so here's my first design:  shards of green mosaic glass (Effetre 023) on green nile opalino (Effetre 516) with accents of medium red (Effetre 432).

These beads will be made into earrings and maybe a bracelet, and will be posted to my Etsy shop (etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss) in time for Thanksgiving weekend.

Primitives

I love copper!  It's such a warm color.  And it reminds me of the sandstone cliffs of the Grand Canyon and Sedona as well as autumn leaves.  So I've been experimenting with beads that will go with copper findings.  Here are some of the beads that I've come up with:

Top left is Reichenbach Multicolor (RL6209) with Double Helix Triton frit;  top right is a bead made with the same glass, but reduced.  Second row left is Dark Violet (Effetre 274) with a twist of intense black and white swirled around the equator of the bead and heated so that the intense black begins to fragment.  Right is Fossil (Effetre 683) with shards of Italian Marble (Avenue Beads).  Third row right is Brown Rock (Effetre 654) with a stripe of Dark Turquoise (Effetre 236).  Third row middle is Pink Stripe (Effetre 253)---it's much darker than the illustration at Frantz glass.  Third row right is Sedona (Effetre 257) with a thin stripe of copper foil wrapped around the equator and burned off.  Fourth row are beads made of Opal Yellow (Effetre 266) with moss green (9350),  grey-green (9320) and aquamarine (9550) Thompson enamels accented with silver wire.

Right now I'm working on cooper bead caps for these beads and soon they'll turn up as earrings on the Etsy site:  www.etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss.