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.

Sedona stripes

A few years ago, my husband and I took a road trip to Sedona to visit my step-daughter.  I fell in love with the landscape, the red rocks, the pine trees, the sunsets.  These beads are a homage to Sedona:

I start the bead with a base layer of red roof tile (440), then add stripes of yellow ochre (460), EDP (254), light turquoise (232) and Vetrofond tangerine (944).  I place a layer of silvered ivory between the turquoise and the EDP, and wrap a few inches of fine silver wire (26 gauge) over the silvered ivory and burn it off, forming beads of silver.  Before I place the bead in the kiln for annealing, I heat in the hottest part of the flame to remove the white deposits which form on the EDP.  When the beads are cool, they are ready form make into jewelry which I sell in my Etsy shop (etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss).