Sunday 26 July 2009

Inspiration...



More inspiration from nature...two hydrangea bushes in front of my house are in bloom and the colours are so beautiful, I had to try and make a bead in the same colours! Half the fun of creating a bead is looking at all my glass rods and deciding which ones to use. For the base of the bead, I used this gorgeous semi-transparent mauve and I think it's worked perfectly, along with the swirls of blue, pink and lilac.

I have just listed the bead, along with some others, on ebay, but I'm so tempted to keep it! Chris (hubby) says, "You can always make another one..." and technically I can...but the wonderful - and sometimes frustrating - thing about beadmaking is that you can rarely make two beads exactly the same. Which is great for anyone who buys one, because you know that your bead will be truly individual!

Sunday 19 July 2009

Broke




















Not me, but these two lovely beads!

Every now and then it happens - you're taking the bead off the mandrel, cleaning it or even just looking at it and suddenly it's in pieces. I've been very lucky up until this point, in that it's only ever happened to beads I don't care about. Unfortunately, I love these two! The first broke in three pieces and the second has a chip out of the top. Why did it happen? Sometimes it can be down to different glasses being incompatible with each other or there too much silver on the bead, it may be pressed too thin or waved around in the cold air for too long when you take it out of the flame.

Whatever the reason, I'm not happy about it. I'm really enjoying making spacey beads and I particularly love these - I can spend ages looking at them and I see something new every time. They are made with a black glass that reacts with silver, pure silver foil and silver rich glass - Aurae (again!) and another one called Triton.

Still, nothing a bit of glue won't fix, and now I'm just going to have to keep them both...hee hee!