Blue is the colour

Laura Sparling, who as regular readers of my blog will know, is my favourite beadmaker, has recently been honoured with becoming a Creation is Messy glass tester (well deserved), you can read more about it in her blog. I've been reading Laura's blog since I first became interested in making beads - even before I started making them myself. She's so knowledgeable, I'm sure she will provide very useful feedback to CiM on their new glasses. She's set herself the target of testing every colour in their range and has done reports on some of them already.

Knowing my passion for all things blue and her inclination towards random acts of kindness, she passed along some of her CiM stash for me to try. The postman delivered one each of every blue rod that CiM do and so one of the main reasons I've been so quiet since I got back from holiday is that I'm having a total blue-fest in my studio and loving it!

I have made lots of experimental beads over the last week but here are a couple of my favourites so far:

This small lentil shaped bead is made from a twistie of Glacier, Lapis and Grumpy Bear (what an odd name for glass!) and then encased with Halong Bay. I will definitely be making more of these after I place an order for more Halong Bay - so far this is my favourite of the new colours.

When you see it "in person", the rod itself is only partially transparent but when it's melted, as you can see, it's completely see thru'.

The footprint of the base of the lentil doesn't quite reach to the end nearest the camera and so you can see some of the bead hole through the transparent encasing - this is a fault in my opinion and when I go into production, the beads I make jewellery out of will have the base extending right to the end.

This prototype of a nugget shaped bead is made with Peacock, which is a CiM colour I already had in my stash but it is shot through with Leaky Pen sent by Laura. Leaky Pen is such an apt name, it is exactly the colour of the ink I used to get all over my fingers when trying to use fountain pens at school. (Yes, I can remember that far back!) It's a very intense colour - a lot goes a long way. The Peacock rod looks similar to Halong Bay in that it is only partially transparent - I don't know if you can see from the photograph but unlike Halong Bay, Peacock has retained some of the semi-opacity and hasn't become totally transparent when melted.

I have made a batch of these beads today but I've put lots more trails of Leaky Pen in them and so they look even better than the one photographed here and more like the nugget beads I was making last year. Hopefully I'll get them made into jewellery and on my stall in time for this Saturday!

At the time I was making the nuggets, I was trying to come up with a transparent turquoise/aquamarine coloured version of it but nothing quite worked. When I saw Pulsar in the CiM blues, I thought I may have found the answer but it's a very bubbly glass if you so much as waft it anywhere near the torch! By encasing it in other transparent colours, I was able to get rid of that effect and get some beads that I like. The photographs haven't come out very well so I'll save those when I can re-do them.

Update on Missy: we are all sleeping much better now, she's much more back to her normal self. The vet saw her for a check up on Tuesday and declared that the wound looked "perfect" so we're all hopeful that the stitches will come out on Monday and she can finally drop the daft looking lampshade.