Sunday, July 3, 2011

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, etchedCanyon de Chelly and Caramel Apple
Canyon de Chelly and Effetre Copper Green, etchedCanyon de Chelly and Copper Green
One of my favorites - Canyon de Chelly base with Double Helix Psyche scrollsCanyon de Chelly and Psyche
This might be my favorite set ever with CdC. The base is Copper Green and silver foil, the scrolls are CdC :) The beads are etchedCopper Green and Canyon de Chelly
This silver-cored bead has a Canyon de Chelly base with Psyche "flowers" I made from a striped CdC/Psyche latticinoCanyon de Chelly and Psyche
Here's a set made with the Psyche flowersCanyon de Chelly and Psyche
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!

Saturday, July 2, 2011

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:Flower marbleImplosion marbleAmanita muscaria mushroom marble

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!