Fixin' the Kiln

I've been working on my kiln the past few weeks. It hasn't been working quite right for me since I bought it a year and a half ago. I think it's been running too hot. Metallic lusters keep evaporating off my beads after only an hour or two in the kiln. And since almost all of my beads have some metallic luster, I need to get this problem fixed!

It's a Glass Hive Regular Guy kiln, and Mike and Pam at Glass Hive have gone above and beyond in trying to help me solve this problem. One issue I had was my kiln element was hanging down out of the ceiling because a fire brick had broken. They sent me an element replacement kit, with an element and new fire bricks, and I actually changed it out myself!

Coffee + tools + girl power + instructions I didn't read right because I'm blonde + a cheer-up from my kiln = replacement element installed pretty much okay I think!

Though the element did need to be replaced, that didn't solve my reduction problems. The next thing Mike and Pam suggested was that I drill a new hole for my thermocouple, about an inch above where it was sitting now. That would put it closer to the elements and they said it would give a more accurate temperature reading. I did that last night (with my girl power tool wielding confidence) and ran another test of metallic glass beads.

With the thermocouple adjustment, the silver glass reduction stayed for an hour longer than it did before, but still - it vanished - and that's no good for me.

The next thing I'm going to do is lower my kiln temps down even further, plus shorten my annealing time which was set too long for my tiny beads anyway, and I'm going to test metallic glass again tonight. I also might buy a stand-alone pyrometer so I can get an independent temperature reading. I've tried the activated charcoal trick, which had no effect on my beads (probably because my kiln was simply too hot), but I might try that again too.

I have a couple of customers waiting to see if I can do metallic bead special orders for them. They've been really patient since I have no date yet when my kiln will start behaving! Who knows, maybe tonight will be the night, when I find that perfect temperature and annealing time that works for my silver glass beads!

Have a great weekend! :)

New! Mica Lustre Beads!

For the past few months, I've been hiding out in my studio developing a new bead style. Finally, the experiment is complete and the beads are ready to reveal!

Introducing my new Mica Lustre beads! 

Bright colors!

Pearly lustres!

These sparkly and festive lampwork beads are hand-painted with mica powders (a.k.a. pixie dust) and cored with sterling silver. They will fit Pandora® chains. Check my Etsy shop, they should be listed soon.

This idea went through many evolutions and trials and errors before I arrived at the style here. It's a really fun process and I'm totally obsessed with it!

How they're made:
First I use Double Helix Zephyr glass to make the clear beads. After they are annealed in the kiln and cleaned, I paint the insides of the holes with mica powders and acrylics. I use teeny tiny paint brushes and a magnifying glass. I leave the paints to cure for a couple of days, then cut sterling silver tubing to core the inside of each bead. Finally I give the silver a shiny polish and they're done! Below are some photos of the process.

Lampworking the bead. I think Zephyr is the best clear for this:

The sparkly mica powders:

Painting the holes. Bottle caps make great little paint pots:

Measuring and cutting the sterling silver tubing. After this step, I use the Jim Moore Bead Press and silver-working tools to put the cores in the beads:

What is mica powder?
If you've ever been curious where pixie dust comes from and how it's colored and made, you can find some of that out on the Wikipedia page about mica here (just in case any of you are science and information geeks like me)!

Mica is found and mined in many places around the world. It comes in different forms like crystalline and sheet mica, but pixie dust is made from a powdered version called wet-ground mica. It gets its vivid range of colors by being coated with different thicknesses of TiO2 (titanium dioxide). Mica is chemically and electrically inert and can withstand very high temperatures. By the way, do you wear eyeshadow? Lipstick? Blush? Do you do drywall work, or house or automotive painting? Do you brush your teeth with sparkly white toothpaste? Then you use mica powder all the time!

I'm so excited to share these new beads with you!

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I Heart Macro

I'm going to give "I Heart Macro" a try this week with a few photos from the back yard:

a spider's lair

blue sage

angelwing begonia

grandmother's cactus

nopalitos

rescued

To Everything...

Everything changes. The only thing certain is change. Go with the flow. Evolve. Here today, different tomorrow. I've made this Etsy treasury in celebration of all things moving, growing and changing in better and more jaw-droppingly wonderful ways.

I'm riding the crest of some interesting creative waves lately, and I'll have some new and amazing work coming to this space soon, so stay tuned! Hint: it involves sparkly things.

In the meantime, enjoy the treasury and leave a comment if you like it!

'Evolve' by beadabundant

change is good :-)

Treasury tool by StylishHome.

Etching Gold Leaf

I just finished a special order that was fun, a challenge, and a learning experience (doesn't it always go that way?)!  I attempted to acid etch sets of beads that had been decorated on the surface with gold leaf.  I had success with some glass types, and here are my results:

Effetre Dark Purple Handmade

Effetre Anice White

CiM Canyon de Chelly

Effetre Dark Ivory

Effetre Mosaic Green

The challenge is that the gold leaf etches right off with the glass in the etch bath!  By cutting my etch time down from a usual 3 minutes to 1 minute and 15 seconds, I was able to get a good etch on the glass and preserve most of the gold.

I learned that some glasses etch faster than others, like Canyon de Chelly and Ivory, making it harder to get gold leaf to stay on these glasses.  And gold leaf stains Ivory glass a beautiful golden brown color which is a nice contrast with the shiny gold leaf.

I tried decorating some transparent colors with gold leaf and etching them, but transparents usually give me a spotty, incomplete etch, so these sets didn't work out.  Sandblasting or tumbling would etch transparent glass, but my gold leaf would definitely not have survived that onslaught!

Have a great beady week peeps!
:)

Cube Beads

It's taking practice, but I love making cube-shaped beads.  Here are a few sets I've made recently.  This first set is made with Double Helix CE-352:

This set is made with Triton:

 

and these are Double Helix Elektra:

The Triton and CE-352 beads are available in my Etsy shop.

The weekend's almost here!  Woo hoo!!!  Happy dance!!!

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!