Latest Bead Sets and Adventures

Good morning bead lovers...
I have a couple of new sets listed in my Etsy shop today. For starters, this Aurae encased set with a beautiful ethereal look in purple and blue pastel colors:These beads are decorated with Psyche stringer designs. Psyche gets nice oil-slick colors if I put it through a couple of reducing/oxidizing cycles. At least that's the look I was going for here:I made this set over the weekend for a custom order. I used a Double Helix odd lot of Terranova called TN-212. The scroll designs are Triton:
The weather is getting a little nicer here. Last week it was freezing cold, 10 degrees, which I've never seen in Sedona before. We're having highs around 60 now. Nice enough to spend time outside again. Here's a photo of my daughter at her riding lesson on Saturday:and the stables with the Tuzigoot ruins in the background:Today she's off to Belize to vacation with her dad for a week. Then off to Grammy and Pop-pop's in Florida for another week. What a life :)And therefore, Mom is going to have lots of bead time and quiet times these next couple of weeks, which is always a welcome luxury!
Have a sparkling Tuesday!

Coffee Beads

I've been busy getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday. I'm hosting dinner for 16! My parents are arriving tomorrow, which means I've been housecleaning! Scrubbing the stove, re-arranging the furniture, scraping the kids' modeling clay off the floor... and I think I've located the dust bunny warren! All of this cleaning just makes me want to relax for a minute with a nice hot cup of cinnamon French roast coffee...I made this set of coffee bean beads and a coffee mug bead last week, it's listed in my Etsy shop. The coffee beans are etched and look very realistic! I thought I had sold the set a few days ago when a customer put it in her cart. She hadn't paid after a day, so I sent her a reminder. She replied that she could not figure out how it got into her cart, and then discovered that her 7-year-old niece had put it in there as a "surprise" for her! :-D Oh well, it's back on the market now!

Also this week, I've made a silver cored bead for a custom order. It has a base of Aurae Light:My customer emailed me about making a silver cored bead for her based on this set of Aurae Light and Kronos frit beads I'd made in the past:When I took this glass recipe and made a silver cored bead with it, the Aurae Light base glass struck to a reddish-orange color, I think because of the heat required for the bigger bead. The Kronos frit and the Aurae fumed nice blue, green a purple colors.

TGIF!

***ETA: My customer for the silver cored bead can't use it because of the orange-red color, so I'll be listing it in my Etsy shop soon. [Not having much luck with the sales of these beads this week, am I? :-D]

New Metallic Orphan Beads

I have two new sets of metallic and striking Double Helix orphan beads in my Etsy shop. This set of blue, green and gold metallics:And this set with pink, purple, orange and gold:Just a quick post tonight, I wanted to let you know about these sets!

Two New Scroll Sets

I have two new scroll design bead sets in my Etsy shop. This first set has Triton scrolls melted into an Ivory base. The reaction between these two glasses makes a great organic webbed effect:The second set is made with a Nyx base and raised Aurae scrolls. I love this glass combo:Here's another Nyx and Aurae set I made a few months ago:
TGIF!!!
:-)

New Silver Cored Beads

I have a couple new silver cored beads listed in my Etsy shop today:The first bead is made with Double Helix odd lot KA-356 and encased with Aether clear. It looks like a sunrise to me. I love the colors and the soft look. KA-356 is translucent so the bead has an inner glow from light reflecting off the silver core.
The second bead is Ivory with Aurae scrolls. It's a nice small bracelet bead, with lots of crackled Ivory detail.

I have 10 more big-holed beads sitting on my bench waiting to be cored. It's been a while since I've listed any new silver cored beads... that's because my Mom bought the silver Pandora bracelet I have been using as a prop in my photos. She asked me how much the bracelet cost, and I thought she meant how much I paid for it. When I told her the price, she wrote me a check for the bracelet. I froze for a second, suddenly realizing that she was buying my photo prop which I need to photograph my silver cored beads. But I couldn't turn away Mom, right? Mom should have what she wants! And if it inconveniences me, well, I think I've inconvenienced her a few times with things a little more dire, starting with birth. So, I've been saving my pennies for a new silver Pandora bracelet, which has now arrived, and is now pictured in my new silver cored bead photos. Whew! And Mom LOVES her bracelet, and now I get to make her a bunch of beads for it!

Silver Cored Beads on Etsy

Here are two of my latest silver cored beads. This first one is made with CiM's Mojito, my favorite pale emerald green glass color. The surface is decorated with raised designs of gold metallic Aurae. The Aurae fumes the Mojito to a golden color and puts a blue mother-of-pearl sheen on the surface:If you view the bead from the side, you can see the Mojito green color and blue sheen:
This next bead is made with Terra2 and Ivory, encased in Aether clear. I tried to keep the bead cool as I worked it to preserve the dark purple and red colors:
I'm doing some Spring cleaning of my bead stash and I'll be listing groups of orphan beads for sale in my Etsy shop.

Aurae Light Spacers

I bought a 1/4 lb. of Aurae Light from Double Helix a few weeks ago, just to try it out. I made a small set of spacers with it:The spacers pictured above turned out nice, but there were many more I made that did not turn out well. I found the glass to be more difficult to reduce than regular Aurae. Not that it doesn't reduce, it just reduces more quickly, or it heats up and strikes to a greenish cast more readily than Aurae. I found I had to hold it way, way out in the flame, like 6-8 inches from the torch face while reducing, and not get the bead too hot.

I think that making really shiny solid spacers from reducing glass is harder than using it as decoration. There is something about the smooth, round face of a spacer bead that lends itself to uneven reduction and striking from overheating. I think Aurae Light would be perfect for raised dots, raised decorations, and under encasing (which I've tried and it looks really pretty).

It's similar to the way Dark Silver Plum works. I learned this from Amber (Naos). If you try and make a smooth round spacer bead with DSP, it often stays black and shiny and it's tricky to get the peacock hues. Yet if you make a textured bead with it, it gets the matte metallic look and the colors much more easily. Reducing glass from Double Helix seems to be the same way in a sense - it's easier to get a nice metallic shine when there's some texture in the surface.

Does it sound like I'm complaining about glass? (There is some line about a craftsman who blames his tools... hmm...) Maybe it's because I've got a head cold right now, ugh! Also I seem to have lost my knack for reducing Triton lately which really has me upset. Is it that the recipe for Triton has changed? Have I forgotten how I used to reduce it? It's really weird. It reduces to a dark grey metallic, then goes right to an over-reduced green-tinted yuck right afterwards. Where's the shiny gold I used to get?

I hope you are healthy and enjoying yourself for the holidays!
More soon :-)

Metallic Thread Beads

I have two new sets on Etsy. This first set is a "destash" of orphaned metallic thread beads. They're various sizes and shapes and use combinations of Nyx, Elektra, Kronos and Aurae:This set is made with a base of Nyx and threads of Aurae:I'm waiting anxiously for the UPS lady today who is bringing a pound of Triton from ABR! They're having a sale on Double Helix glass right now.

Colorful Metallic Beads

I listed these beads on Etsy tonight, and they've sold now, but I have to show them to you!

One of my customers, Jill, asked me recently to make some beads with Elektra glass for her. I hadn't used Elektra in about two years. I had 3 rods collecting dust on my glass shelf because I could never get anything I really liked out of it. I tried making some simple Elektra spacers for Jill in a seafoam green color, but just couldn't do it! It wasn't working for me at all in the way that it does for some glass artists. I had to tell her that unfortunately I couldn't complete her order.
Here are the greenest spacers I could make with my Elektra, but they're really kind of blue, not the seafoam color I wanted:

In one of our last emails Jill suggested that Elektra and Aurae might look nice together, so I gave it a try. The textured colorful beads at the top are the result. I'm so amazed by them - the color is incredible I think! They are made with an Elektra base and surface texture of Aurae.
I'm headed right back to the torch to make more!

It was actually Jill who bought these beads from my shop tonight, I didn't even email her to tell her I was listing them or anything. And she had no idea that they were made using her suggestion. Thank you Jill!
One more pic of the beads:

Click on the photos to see a larger view.
:-)

What I've Been Up To!

It's been quite a while since I last posted on my blog! I'm going to jump right in with a few photos of some beads I've made lately.

This is a silver cored bead made with Aurae glass. I gave a light reduction to an Aurae base bead before applying clear dots over the reduction and melting them in. The translucency of the glass gives the bead a pretty inner glow:

This style I really like, it's a silver cored bead made with Dark Ivory and Aurae scroll designs. Ivory and Aurae mixed together create an incredible 'crackled' look on the bead:

These next beads are made with Dark Silver Plum. They were made for a customer who wanted beads to match a DSP sculptured bird bead she bought from Jennifer Geldard. These beads mimic the eye of the bird. It was an honor to think that my beads might end up on a necklace with a Geldard bird!
If I want to play catch-up, I really have so many bead photos I could post here! The photos above are just a random sampling of some of the things I've made recently. I will be showing more of my favorites in coming posts.

So what have I been up to lately? Life! :-D
In addition to Life, I've been up to my ears in custom bead orders for at least a month. On one day alone I received 6 custom orders which is a record for me. I had to develop a system of index cards to keep it all straight. It's been a real blessing and a great opportunity to talk to some of my customers in more depth, which I love to do. However, I'm so ready to be done with the custom orders now, make beads I 'want' to make, and focus on re-stocking my Etsy shop. I've decided not to take any more custom orders until after the new year.

Now that Life and custom orders are chilling out, I hope to be writing here more often.
Enjoy your weekend!

Ivory and Aurae Beads

I finished one of my Aurae sets yesterday and it's posted in my Etsy shop right now. This set has a base of Curdled Ivory with Aurae scroll designs:The Aurae and Ivory react to make the Aurae turn brown with organic-looking jagged edges, and the Curdled Ivory got very 'curdled' when it reacted with the silver in the Aurae glass.

I'm still working on Aurae sets... can't seem to put this glass down!
More to come, stay tuned!

Aurae!

Finally the Aurae arrived, yay! I've made two sets with it so far and I'm working on two more. Here are the completed sets:
Aurae Accent BeadsEncased Aurae and Kronos FritToday I'm working on the next two sets, one with Aurae and Ivory (nice reaction!) and Aurae and CiM Stone Ground. The Aurae fumes a pretty metallic blue sheen onto the Stone Ground. I'll post pics when they're done.
Have a great day!