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).

More on copper green

In addition to the reaction between copper green and EDP which I talked about last week, copper green reacts with iris orange or raku glass, manufactured by Reichenbach.  This glass has a COE of 96 and so can't be used in large quantities with COE 104 glass, but it can be used as frit, small particles of glass used on the surface of COE 104 glass.  When it is used in this way with copper green, it produces a bright turquoise line of color adjacent to the raku, as shown in this picture:

The top bead is made with lines of raku stringer over a copper green bead.  I make the stringer by tipping the hot tip of a clear glass rod into raku frit, melting and repeating until I have a nice gather of raku.  Then I pull it into a medium diameter stringer, which I apply to the copper green core.  After melting in the raku stringer, I added a few twists for visual interest.  The bottom two beads were made by dipping a core bead of copper green into raku frit, melting the frit in and adding twists.  As usual, look for jewelry made from similar beads in my Etsy shop:  etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss.

Copper green and EDP

One of my favorite colors of Effetre glass is copper green (219).  I like the minty green color when it is used alone.  I think it goes particularly well with black.  It also produces an interesting reaction with Effetre purple (254- also known as Evil Devitrifying Purple because it tends to lose its glassy sheen and become matte if mishandled), which Lynn Short reported on at a recent meeting of Southern Flames. The effect is shown in the beads below:

The color of the copper green glass in proximity to the EDP intensifies to a bright turquoise.  When copper green stringer is applied to an EDP base, there is a line of intense turquoise surrounded by lighter green Upper middle).  The bottom two beads show the effect of EDP stringers on a base bead of copper green.  The downside of using this effect is the possibility of EDP devitrifying and producing a white scum, which it does quite easily.  As suggested on the forum Wetcanvas, right before you finish the bead, put it in the hottest part of the flame until the purple turns glassy.  Then take it out and don't put it back into the flame. 

More silvered ivory

I've been playing around with silvered ivory, this time with light ivory and turquoise.  In a well known reaction, light ivory forms a black line when it meets turquoise, which can be used in designs.  I thought it would be interesting to see what effect this reactions would have been silvered ivory was laid on top of the intersection point.  As you can see in the photograph, it darkens the junction, thus accentuating it:

I've raked across the junction in one or two places, then made a twist and added a cubic zirconium.  The middle bead is made with Nile green, which undergoes the same reaction with ivory.  Expect to see these soon in my Etsy shop:  etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss

Purple and pea green earrings

I've been busy with Christmas preparations, cards, church bake sale and holiday bazaar among other things, so my bead making has suffered.  I've been experimenting, but nothing concrete.  One thing I have accomplished, however, it to make earring to go with a new top I made.  The material is colorful:  purple, pea green, orange, fuchsia, black and white.  I figured that dots would be the best way to incorporate all these colors in a single lentil bead.  So I made a base bead of white, a little smaller than my lentil press and placed dots of black, pea green, eggplant (CIM 655), EDP (Effetre 254) and Tangerine (Vetrofond 939) to cover most of the white bead.  The results are shown below, along with a scrap of leftover fabric:

The EDP had to be heated in intense flame to prevent the devitrification reaction, which was only partially successful, but I don't think it looks that bad on these beads.  The bead on the left has spots of Effetre Pink Stripe (253) instead of EDP.  I don't think it looks very good over white, it seems more apricot than pink, but by itself it produces quite a nice deep pink---more on that in a later post.

I've got a pair of earrings.  A necklace would be lost in the colors of the fabric, but a bracelet might be a nice accessory.

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!

Winter landscape beads

In Margo's class last summer, we made summer landscape beads with green fields and trees in leaf.  For winter, I decided to try my hand at a snowy landscape, not that I'm going to be experiencing snow in Atlanta!  I made a snowy scene by taping two rods of white and one of light grey together with masking tape.  I used this as a single rod to lay down a large gather.  Next to it, I laid a gather from a "rod" of lapis medium pastel, blue cobalt transparent and CIM leaky pen.  This was my night sky.  After shaping, I made a tab with parallel mashers.  I added a moon with a dot of white, then shaped a winter tree using a stringer of pulled from brown, burnt sienna and intense black, loosely twisted together.  To make the trunk gnarly, I heated a small area of the trunk and twisted with a clear stringer.  As a final touch, I added a cubic zirconium to the reverse side of the bead to represent the evening star.

Here are a few of them:

 As usual, these will soon be for sale in my Etsy shop (etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss).