More silver glass: Gaia and Clio

In getting ready for the jewelry market at Spruill Center for the Arts, I made more glass beads using new silver glass colors, Gaia and Clio, as well as my old favorites Thallo and Aurae.  i have to confess that i was unable to get any really nice colors out of Gaia.  i found it much harder to work with than Thallo and i wasn't impressed with the colors after encasing:

In the picture, Thallo beads are on the left, Gaia on the right.  The Gaia doesn't look like more than encased emerald green.

The Clio beads were much nicer. showing an interesting range of colors and a nice metallic sheen when encased:

I'll definitely be working with this color more in the future.

Happy New Year and Aurae Glass

Happy New Year!  I hope this finds all my readers well and eager to fulfill their New years resolutions.  Mine will be taking me away from lampwork glass as a hobby.  I still will be working on glass beads, but I won't have as much time as I have had in the past.  Since I won't have as much time to experiment with new techniques, I will be cutting back on my posting schedule:  perhaps once every three to four weeks instead of every two weeks which I have tried to maintain.

For today, I have just a brief note on Aurae glass.  All of the smaller beads shown have been made with my usual technique of wrapping a small coil of Aurae glass on a mandrel, shaping it briefly, reducing it, then encasing with clear:

The result is a pretty shade of blue over a light purple base.  The larger bead was made using Margaret Zinser's technique which I have described before.  I have also tried to add a stripe of Aurae on a bicone bead using transparent dark amethyst or medium transparent blue without much success.  The reduced Aurae doesn't show up very well.  I'll continue to experiment and show you the results if I'm successful.