Merry Everything!

Merry Christmas! And happy holidays to those who don't celebrate Christmas!

I listed some Christmas beads on eBay at $0.99 today, they should be up around 10 PM Eastern time.

And on that note (and apologies for my spotty posting) I bid you adieu. I have to go and eat a lot of turkey and pie.

Hmmm, I'm already behind on my blog. Not that I've set a schedule for myself or anything, but I had hoped to post these pictures while the beads were still on eBay. That ship has long since sailed!

At any rate, I wanted to talk about coral. Coral coloured glass, though, not the sea creatures. Apparently, every time they make coral glass at the factory in Italy, it turns out a slightly different colour. As you can see from the picture: yes, those are all coral. Thankfully the glass distributors seem to have caught on and have been giving them different names to differentiate. So if you seem someone talking about peach persimmon coral as opposed to sunny mango coral, they're not on drugs. It's all the Italian's fault.

Autumn Colours

As the weather turns cooler, my thoughts turn more to autumn colours. I tend to make beads in neutral tones, like ivory, greys and browns, and black. I also like to use colours that I think of as "autumn jewels," like apple green, amber, and amethyst purple.

On a clothing front, autumn is time to break out the sweaters and corduroy pants, which inevitably makes me think of textured beads. So I've been making a bunch of those too.

The lozenges above were listed on eBay, ending this Thursday. The textured beads will be slowly added to my Etsy store.

Erica Cane

What the heck is Erica Cane? Well, it's my attempt to use my (very large) stash of frit to make handmade Gaffer Cane. I don't have a glass furnace, so what I did was melt a gather of glass, dip it in frit, melt it in, and then wind it into a bead. I'd played with this technique before, but I was checking out Val Cox's website. She was doing something similar, but she had the idea of layering transparent frits over opaque ones. The end result is pretty close to Gaffer cane, but with not quite as many layers.

Gaffer Glass

I've been having a lot of fun the last few days, playing with my small stash of Gaffer cane. My understanding of how this cane is made is that a gather of glass is melted in a furnace, and then rolled in intense colour, and then coated in clear glass. The gather is then pulled into rods that lampworkers can use. (You can also do multiple layers of colours, or have layers of opaque and transparent glass.) When you make these into beads, the result are fabulous: threads and layers of colour combine into a lovely swirly bead that never fails to fascinate my eye.

I will slowly be listing these on Etsy, a few a day as time allows.

First post

Woo!

This is my first post, but my intention with this blog is to keep track of my bead and jewelry making.

So please check back, I'm sure I'll have lots of bead porn to look at in the coming weeks.