Beads with Canyon de Chelly Glass

One of my favorite earth tone glasses is Canyon de Chelly from CiM. It reacts in interesting ways with other glass colors. Here are some examples of beads I've made with Canyon de Chelly:

Canyon de Chelly base with ASK Caramel Apple scrolls, etched
Canyon de Chelly and Effetre Copper Green, etched
One of my favorites - Canyon de Chelly base with Double Helix Psyche scrolls
This might be my favorite set ever with CdC. The base is Copper Green and silver foil, the scrolls are CdC :) The beads are etched
This silver-cored bead has a Canyon de Chelly base with Psyche "flowers" I made from a striped CdC/Psyche latticino
Here's a set made with the Psyche flowers
So, there's a gallery of my favorite Canyon de Chelly beads to date! There are so many other glasses I haven't tried CdC with, but if I find some great new combos I'll share them with you here.

Hint: If you work with Psyche and Canyon de Chelly together, give the Psyche a couple rounds of reducing/oxidizing, getting it metallic, then erasing the metallic shine. This will develop more colors.
:)
Have fun on the 4th!
Love ya beautiful bead peeps!

P.S. Soon I'm moving my blog to my website. I'll let you know when that happens. I really don't want to leave the glass community here on the Blogger blogs though, so I'm still going to keep this blog open and post here too, to some degree, I'm not sure how it will all work yet!

Marbles

Over the past month or two I've been making marbles. I learned how to make them years ago from a video, but I haven't tried them again in a long while. Here are a few of my recent ones:

For the clear on these marbles, I used some large diameter Effetre rods. If you go over to my Facebook BeadAbundant page, you can see all the pictures of my recent marbles in my Marbles photo album.

Maybe some time I'll make a video of me creating a marble (Thanks for the inspiration, Kathy!). It takes about 1/2 hour to make one, so I need to get a bigger card for my video camera so I can capture video longer than 10 minutes.

The hardest part of marble-making for me to get has been removing the final punty, melting the bump flat, and tossing it in the kiln before it cracks or rolls away! (The roll-away thing has happened a few times. I've always been able to grab them up off the floor with my hotfingers, toss them in the kiln and never had a problem with them!).

These days I'm busy building a new website, and I'm deeply engrossed in all the crazy coding and all that technical lingo I don't understand. It's the kind of project I have to get intensely obsessed over for a few days, because if I leave it and come back after a day or two break, I've forgotten little details like the hex number for my background color or where in the CSS code to put my header width. I forget all the terms and what they mean and what I'm doing, and then it takes me a while to get back on track.

A person can't simply be a maker of glass trinkets these days and expect to survive in the cut-throat world of lampworking, oh no no! You have to be an ace studio photographer, a Photoshop geek and a technological wizard! And that's just to get started! Then you have to be a savvy marketer and sales person, a prolific blogger, social networker and emailer, and have pretty packaging to boot! I knew being a Super Mom was training for something!

Well beautiful, loyal, wonderful blog readers... I will be moving my Blogger blog (that's this blog that you're reading) when I finish re-doing my website. My blog will be integrated with my site and will be its homepage. For a while I will be double-posting, but after a while I won't be updating this blog anymore. Not leaving it yet, but soon. I will give you more warnings, and the link to my new blog.

Have a great Fourth of July weekend, USA bead peeps! And happy weekend to everyone else too!

Nyx Hollow Beads

Greetings bead lovers! I'd like to show off this simple pair of Nyx glass hollow beads I made recently. I'm still practicing with hollows so the shape is a little "organic." At least I got dimpled ends on this pair, that was my main goal. I love using just a single glass color in my beads, and Nyx is great for that because of its variety of metallic shades:

It's been ages since I've written in this blog! I often think about my blog and miss it like a good friend I haven't talked to in a while. It's so good to be back in touch.
More soon I hope. I've been making marbles and want to show you some pictures of them!

Spring Is In The Air

We're still having some cold weather, and there's still snow on the ground in lots of places around the country, but Spring is indeed on its way. I found these daffodils sprouting up in my yard last weekend:
I've made another bead video, still practicing with the video editing software and having fun with it. The video below demos an Ivory bead with Gaia scroll designs, like the beads in this set:The background music is a little dramatic! (turn down your volume :-D) ..but I had to find a music piece that fit the length of the video, and it was some pretty cool music, so there it is for you. Enjoy...

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!

Video: Silver Coring a Bead

February has arrived! Not my favorite month, but at least it's a short one and spring cannot be far away. I know most of you are buried in snow today... good time to curl up with a warm beverage and read blogs! :)
Here is my first bead video about silver coring. It's only the second video I've ever edited and completed. It doesn't go into a lot of depth because like my javalina video, it was mostly for practice. Maybe if the bead business doesn't pan out I have a future in Hollywood film-making!? Yeah!!!

Here are some beads that have emerged from my studio in the past week or two. This first set is made with Ivory and Gaia scroll designs:
These beads are made with an odd lot of Double Helix glass called CE-352G. They have a beautiful brown-ish gold color with streaks of opaque light brown:
I have a couple of Triton sets too. Click on the images, some of these bead sets are still available in my Etsy shop:
I'm editing my next video right now which is a demo of me making the Ivory/Gaia scroll set pictured above. I'll post it here when it's ready.

Are you following my Facebook bead page? I often post there first when I have something new because I'm already on FB 24/7 anyway (hee hee). Come on down for a visit! http://www.facebook.com/beadabundant
Stay warm!

New Videos and Beads

Howdy bead lovers, I'm back to the blog after a long time away for the holidays. I feel like I've been busy with domestic duties and house-guests since November. I think just this week I finally exhaled!

I have a lot of things saved up to write about. One of my newest enterprises is making bead videos and posting them to YouTube. I have one bead video posted so far and a few others that are shot but not edited. For practice editing and posting videos, I started with this one of a javalina in my back yard:

This week at the torch, I made these silver cored beads using Triton, Aurae and Ivory and encased them with Aether clear. They were all made with the same glass recipe yet turned out so differently:
And this one with a base of Ivory and scroll designs in Gaia:
On to February, let's make it a great month!
:)