Devardi greens

My kiln is waiting for a new relay, so in the meantime I'll report on a project I've been working: playing with a stash of Devardi green glass I recently purchased from Amazon.  The glass is a mixture of rods of various colors and transparancies:

Using different frits, enamels and pixie dust, I've come up with an interesting assortment of basic round beads to use in future jewelry projects:

I especially like pixie dust---more on that later.

Copper foil

It's summer so it's time for Margo Knight's lampwork bead class at Spruill Arts Center in Atlanta.  For the first class of the session, we learned the tricks of how to apply copper foil to beads, something which I have done before without much success.  It turns out that you must lay down a thick layer of enamel prior to placing and marvering the foil (except for white---more about this next time).   Then you must heat the glass to develop the blue-green color.  I applied frit (Georgia Peach from Val Cox) on top of the heated copper, followed by teal and white stringer, and finally gold foil:

The tabs in the above photo were made on white glass with enamel, and the tube bead was made on turquoise with enamel.

Garden lapidary lampwork bead

Last week at a meeting of Southern Flames, members had the opportunity to grind down a lapidary bead they had created to reveal the hidden layers underneath the outer coating.  We use equipment provided by Stephanie White of Beads by Design.  My bead consisted of a core of dichroic glass.  I then wrapped green filigrana glass around the core to create "vines, and added millefiori to resemble flowers.  After encasing in clear, I added opaque green enamel to hide the garden.  After grinding and polishing, this is what my bead looked like:

For full details and pictures of everyone's beads, see the Southern Flames website (www.southernflames.org).

Turquoise and enamel

I've already done quite a bit of experimenting with enamels on glass and below is a combination that I like:

Thompson Enamel transparent beryl green (9443) on top of light turquoise (Effetre), with and without melted silver wire.  I like the ocean waves effect.  Look for these soon in my Etsy shop:  www.etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss

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.