Christmas is coming

I heard my first Salvation Army bell ringer of the season last Friday, so that's my sign that I should start thinking about Christmas beads.  I love the smell of pine bough wreaths, so here's my first design:  shards of green mosaic glass (Effetre 023) on green nile opalino (Effetre 516) with accents of medium red (Effetre 432).

These beads will be made into earrings and maybe a bracelet, and will be posted to my Etsy shop (etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss) in time for Thanksgiving weekend.

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.

Starry sky beads

In a recent issue of Soda Lime Times, I found out about an interesting technique using silver foil.  It has to be foil;  leaf won't work, not enough silver is deposited on the bead.  Take a dark color like black or transparent cobalt blue,  and make a base bead.  Shape as desired.  Then heat the bead and press silver foil all around the bead and marver it in.  Burn it off in the flame, and tiny flecks of silver will be left on the bead.  Then add glass frit, such as Bead Goodies Atlantis.  The frit will move the silver flecks, forming a halo around the pieces of glass frit.  Twist and add a cubic zirconium if desired, and voila:

For earrings made from these beads, see my etsy site:  etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss

Shards

I've been experimenting over the past few weeks on making shards:  thin pieces of blown glass.  The technique utilizes a hollow mandrel.  a globe of glass is created on the end of the mandrel and when it is closed off and heated, it can be blown into a hollow ball of glass.  The glass can be shattered into small pieces which are placed on a gather of glass.  The result is a thin layser of color on a larger glass bead.  For example:

The above beads are made starting with a gather of periwinkle blue glass.  Shards of dark amethyst are added onto the gather after it is pressed into a lentil mold.  Then a stringer of amethyst glass is added to the top of the bead, twisted into a swirl and accented with a cubic zirconium.  This is just one of many possibilities of color combinations.  See these beads as earrings on my etsy site:  etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss.

More shells

I'm continuing to work on lampwork glass adaptations of basic shell designs---I guess I'm becoming obsessed with this project, but I love lampwork glass bead-making and I love shells!  For this post, I've made a nautilus shell and a moon snail (which is my favorite Florida shell).  For both types, I start with a round gather made of ivory, then I pres it.  I add an extension on one side to represent the mouth.  For the nautilus, I add a twistie of ivory and dark amber on both sides in a spiral design.  I then make a twist in the center of the bead to emphasize the spiral of the nautilus.  Two examples are shown below:

The bottom bead in the picture is my version of a moon snail.  I start the same way as the nautilus, but press the extension of the shell to create the "mouth".  Then I add a twistie of ivory and sandstone (which has grey overtones) on one side of the bead only, which mimics the subtle spiral of the moon snail.  I also twist this a little off center, and add a cubic zirconium in the middle of the twist.

Bead exchange

Last weekend was the last lampwork beadmaking class of the summer, and as agreed, we all brought beads to trade.  My contribution was shown last week.  Below are all of the contributions:

What looks like a line across the top is a mandrel that I used to prop up the beads to display the donut beads.  I love the flamingo, and the shells and the donut beads, but my favorite is the bead in the middle by Lynn.  The olive green in the background is light aqua which reacts with ivory to produce the green tones.  Lynn then added stripes of pea green over the aqua.  It reminds me of the wind blowing through oat grass on the Florida Panhandle coast!

The bracelet that I made out of the beads is shown below, using Swarovski crystal beads as spacers:

Since I have a lot of T-shirts that are turquoise or coral, I'll get a lot of wear out of it.   Thanks everyone for sharing your creations!

Trade beads for Margo's class

I can't believe we only have one more class this summer!  We all agreed that we wanted to make bracelet-sized beads to trade with each other so that we each can make a bracelet.  The colors we agreed on were the following: light and dark ivory, light transparent aqua, color (Effetre heat wave) and pea green.  We don't have to use all of the colors in the beads,so I chose light transparent aqua and light ivory to create a beach scene.  Then I added murrini made from light ivory and coral to create a sea shell effect.

I can't wait to see what everyone else came up with!