Southwest frit

After having spent a month touring the national parks of Arizona and Utah, I feel inspired to make beads and jewelry with a southwestern motif.  I've attempted to recreate the scenery of the winter landscape:  sagebrush and juniper against a background of red sandstone mesas.  I made my own frit mixture from commando (CIM 475), shrubbery (CIM 410), muskmelon (CIM426), pine tree (Effetre 344), light brown (Effetre 0444, spanish leather (Effetre 423), and brown rock (Effetre 654).  Here's what the frit mixture looks like:

Here are some of the beads I've made from it:

The three beads on the left were made by adding the frit to a base beads of commando, canyon de chelly (CIM 722) and stone ground (CIM 351), respectively plus periwinkle (Effetre 220) for the sky.  I melted in silver wire on the second bead from the left.  The bead on the right was made by adding frit to a base bead of red roof tile.

As usual, it's highly likely that these beads or ones like them will end up on my Etsy site:  etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss

Sea urchins

More shells from Diane Woodall's and Becky Mason's small shell tutorial, this time sea urchins.  These are relatively easy;  just make a round bead, flatten the bottom, and place dots on the top section:

The dark green beads are made with Commando (CIM 475), while the light green are made with Lichen (Vetrofond 986).  I tried dots of raku (upper righ0t, but I think I like dots of silvered ivory better (the remaining beads).  I'm coming up with some good ideas about how to use these in jewelry, so visit my web site (etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss) in a month or two.

Pod beads in cage

Two weeks ago I attended a workshop given at Chastain Arts Center on investment casting by Liaung Chung Yen, who was a participant in the Atlanta Contemporary Jewelry Show.  In this technique, you use investment (a kind of plaster used in casting) to hold metal pieces together so that you can solder them all at once.  If you tried to solder the pieces individually, the heat from soldering the third piece would melt the solder connection from the first and second pieces and the whole thing would fall apart.  The piece I made was a metal cage, with seven pieces of square silver wire, soldered at top and bottom, then treated with liver of sulfur:

This looks like a pod to me, so I spent the last week making seeds for it out of various shades of olive green and yellow-orange glass, which I then added to the pod:

The beads are sage green (Effetre 211) with Vetrofond tapenade (963) dots, commando (CIM 475) with Effetre coral sunset (420) dots and and unknown orangy color with Vetrofond lichen (986) dots, all of them beautiful fall colors!