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.
Not BB King or Muddy Water blues, these are hap-hap-happy blues. I made a couple of these beads as experiments and have decided to go into production with them, there are a whole bunch of them cooling down in the kiln as I type. They have a CIM Lapis base, a frit blend melted in and then encased in clear. I like the way the Lapis has "veined" behind the individual shards of frit colours.
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.
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.
The price I pay for being able to make jewellery out of recycled glass beads like the above bracelet (made from recycled cava bottle glass) is holes in my clothes!
I seem to be making a lot of monochrome beads recently, don't I? It's not just that a customer asked me for a black and white akamai. It could also be something to do with Laura Sparling's March calendar picture which shows a collection of her lovely black and white beads, but there's more to it than that. I have a special occasion lunch to attend next week and I want to make a nice necklace to match my top which is black white and a bit of grey. I'm wearing it with charcoal trousers and maybe a new pair of boots, if not I'll be wearing my old black ones. I am cutting it a bit fine timewise to get it all finished though!
I have quite a few different colour-ways in the akamai bead: orange and brown, violet and turquoise, blue and green. I was asked not long ago if I could make a black and white one. I already knew that Effetre black glass is in fact very dark transparent violet colour but I wasn't sure about other manufacturers' black. Just like Cava bottle glass (which is very dark greeny/brown) the Effetre black glass specifically made for beadmaking by the Italians isn't black at all - it just looks black under most lighting conditions. If you pull a thin stringer of black glass and lay it over a light opaque colour, it doesn't stay black.
The above photograph also uses black glass and sis but this time, the black is made by Effetre. When spread out, it's an entirely different colour, not sure I would describe it as violet but it has probably reacted with the silver in the sis anyway.
The above beads are the most black of all, this time I've used Intense Black and it's done it's usual webbing out thing which is sometimes desirable in beads. The photograph doesn't show it that well, but the "black" is blue in places. You can see some top right of the right hand bead and there's also some of the "violet" in the webbing too. 
I have now made a Recycled Black Glass page on my website. I've photographed a few of the Cava bottle recycled earrings and added them and also moved the Aeolian Treasure jewellery to that page as well so although this jewellery is not new to my stall, they are new to the website and my blog. The photograph above is just one as an example.
I took this photograph of my tweezers so I can remember them before they completely fall apart! Look at the way the metal has bent in the heat of the torch whilst they hold the shards of broken glass firmly in place. I have bashed them back into shape more times than I can recall but they are so brittle now, they will just snap off if I apply any more pressure to them. I have to hold the glass so high up the length of the tweezer arms that they get hotter much faster than they used to so they can only work for short periods at a time. This is why I have three pairs in use so they can cool down but I can keep working continuously. You can even see where the wood has charred; occasionally they catch fire too and I have to quench them in a bowl of water I have on standby (hence the rust too). I think they are kind of beautiful in a way.
I made the bead on the left last week and was really pleased with the lovely purples and blues that I got out of encasing Double Helix's Pandora glass. It's quite an expensive glass containing a lot of silver and that's what leads to all the fun! I've had some Pandora in my glass stash for a long time and never managed to get any really nice colours out of it but when I "stormed" the glass before encasing after buying a tutorial on the storming technique written by Amy Kinsch, the bead on the left was the happy result.
Here are some triangle beads that I made with a transparent black base, dots of Effetre fossil (which give a stratified effect which looks a bit like a swirly fingerprint in the background) and then each dot is encased with Effetre transparent red. Again, I tried to ensure I made all the beads exactly the same way but look at the colour shift I got when striking - the ones on the right are positively orange!
Over the last three years, these are the different colours of "Iris Blue" I have been sent.
I baked these fairy cakes yesterday. They seem to be called cupcakes nowawadays but when I was young, my mum used to make these for our birthday parties and we called them angel fairy cakes (the bits on the top are supposed to be angel's wings) so that's what I'm sticking to. I have tried to make them look exactly the same as she did, my sisters will undoubtedly tell me whether I've got them right or not and I shall take some round to my mum and dad's next time we visit so we can take a trip down memory lane; there are only two years between Sandy and I; there was always a battle over the right to lick the spoon and bowl after the cakes were made. :-)
Thanks, Jenn!
