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.