Barrels of Fun

I was digging through my beads the other day and I found a few barrel beads I've made over the past few weeks and thought I'd share them. Although mine are still a bit sloppy, this is one of my favorite shapes to make. It's a pretty hard shape to make even  - I'm not so hot at this yet but am getting better. I've wasted plenty of glass trying to make barrel shapes because I couldn't get it shaped right.

I use a marver to shape them, which is a piece of square graphite on a stick. I wrap a barrel shape in the flame and then roll it across the marver to help tighten the barrel shape. This is where things go bad for me....usually one side of the barrel looks beautiful and the other side..not so pretty. So I keep trying, heating and rolling..heating and rolling, it's a delicate rolling lightly but not too lightly process. I think I'll get the hang of it a bit better with more practice. It has gotten a little easier but I have day where barrel beads just aren't happening no matter how many times I try.

Once in awhile I make out with an A-ok barrel shape. I picked a few out to take pictures of and share.

This is probably my favorite one (I was on my game this night, lol). It's made of ivory that was rolled in silver and the silver heated. The silvers reaction in the flame is the earthy greenish/brown areas you see. The dots are turquoise and more silver/ivory. With this barrel I folded the edges in..I have not done this successfully since this bead.

I really fell in love with the way these colors worked together in this little barrel set. It reminds me of a watercolor painting.

Here's a pretty fun colored barrel. It's a bit lop-side (see told you I have trouble with this) but I like how the dots turned out. This one reminds me of a dinosaur egg.

Not one of my favorites...but I was expermenting with clear and this new purple I had gotten, which I do not like how matte the purple ends up being. Not sure what I'm going to do with the purple yet. Most of my attempts with this purple I have not been happy with but it looks so pretty before it goes into the flame....sigh..

This one is more of a bicone shape...well an attempted bicone shape, lol. I used the ivory, turquoise and silver on this one too. I topped each of the dots off with a transparent glass. My ends could use work and so could the shape but all that aside (yeah i know that's like everything about a bead) not bad for my first bicone.

My little petroleum green glass barrel. He's a short and fat little bead with a silver ivory lined design. I like this one for the way this particular green looks. It has a cool streaky kind of look to it and this was one of the first times I successfully applied a spiral design with a stringer without having it break off in the flame or start melting so fast I lose control and end up with a crooked line.

This little black and white barrel was made with my b&w soda bead set. I had another pretty good spiral with the stringer method on this barrel. After I added the spiral I added some dots in an upward spiral motion to carry the design to the other end of the bead.

That's the last one! I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgivings! I had hoped to have a few pictures posted from ours but of course when I got my camera out to take pictures I had no juice! The batteries had died...I use up camera batteries like it's my job. I should have known to have had extra ones on me!

Glass Chopsticks & More

Glass Chopsticks? That's what my mother-in-law called all the different colored glass rods in my studio when she stopped by the other day. I started laughing and agreed they do look like chopsticks sticking out from the rows of mason jars I have set up.

Wanna see all my glass chopsticks? lol...ok, here's a picture of them.....probably not as exciting as it sounds, but I certainly do get inspired by color when I see them. Hopefully one day I'll have a bit better of a set up for all the glass rods but for now this works just fine.

Well while I'm at it let me show you around my studio a bit. This is where all the bead making takes place, my torch area. I have a beautifully tiled area (so nothin' catches fire)  and my gorgeous new red Mega Minor Torch set up. There are ready to go mandrels (oh wait...I see there aren't many, lol...I've been busy making beads), stringers within reach and all my tools scattered everywhere. I try to keep it fairly clean but creativity isn't always a neat process.

This is where all my bad beads go, all my attempts that turned to failure....it's called the Craptastic bin of beads. My son absoultely loves to dig through these and pick out ones he likes....I'm glad someone loves these sad, sad beads.

And this is the area I do all my bead cleaning. It's one of the very time consuming, tedious, unfun parts of beadmaking. I don't mind it but I do put it off for as long as  I can and I always end up with too many beads to clean at once. As you can see from the picture below I have a bunch of beads in the container with water and I have a cup full of beads on mandrels soaking. You have to soak the mandrels in water for a little to loosen the bead release, then the beads pretty much just pull right off. Sometimes you get a stubborn bead and that's when you just have to use something to grip the mandrel as you twist the bead off.

 

I also have a little spot for jewelry making but that's a REAL mess...so I've opted for not taking a picture of that area!

Alright on to the "More" part of this post.

I've been practicing my disk making lately. I love the way disk beads look!  I don't know why, they just scream fun and funky style to me. When I first started lampworking, the sprial disk method is how I was taught to start all my round beads. It's the best way, when done well, to get perfectly dimpled holes on each side of the bead. I wasn't very good at this in the beginning but over time I've gained much more control of  applying the glass and keeping the spiral controlled. The better your sprial, the easier it is melt down and shape into a round bead.

These spiral disks never got a chance to see the round bead stage. I stopped at the spiral. I can still see I need lots of practice if I want to stop my bead at this spiral stage. I have plenty of uneven spirals here but they still look so fun! LOL, it's eye candy! PLUS now I have little color samples of many of my opaque glass rods (chopsticks, if you like).

Now last night I got a little more creative wth these sprials. I started adding raised dots, poked dots, adding different layers of glass to the spirals and dots.  I also discovered that if you top off each opaque color with a little bit of transparent glass you get a wonderful shine. I'm hooked on doing this right now.

WARNING: Spiral bead yumminess below...

I really like this color combonation of sky blue and purple. I did some dot poking on this one as you'll see by the little floating air bubbles in each dot.

Yep...I got way out of control with decorations on this one. Isn't it fun though? I used several different colors of both opaque and transparent glass.  The side dots also having floating bubbles in them. This little bead reminds me of a piece of candy.

Here's some dot layering and spiral layering. I started with a dark amethyst transparent and topped it with some opaque lime green glass. Added purple dots and topped those with transparent green.

Purple, lime green, blue and transparent purple make up this little guy.

And the last one I layered white dots and then squished em' with a pair of flat head pliers. Squishing those white dots gave me perfect petal shapes and a flower bead was born. You can see a closer look at this flower bead used in a jewelry design of mine here: Funky Girl

I'm gettin' the hang of it...but have plenty of figuring out left to do! Sprials are really a lot of fun to work with and add such a fun touch to a set of beads. Thanks for stopping!

Have a great week!

Oh, I have to say HAPPY 10th BIRTHDAY to Brady!!! - love, mommy

A Little Something From My Trips

When  I went to Colorado this past summer to visit my family, my mom showed me a bunch of beautifully handcrafted jewelry pieces she had made. Every piece was stunning. One of my favorite things about her jewelry pieces was her use of different types of metal wire. I had never thought much about what was available outside of silver and gold so when she showed me one of her pieces done in copper wire I was in LoVe with it!

A whole new world of design possiblities just appeared before me and I actually did come home from that trip and purchase copper wire but it has sat unused for some time. I couldn't find what I felt like was the right color for complimenting the copper.  I wanted something that popped.

Well as luck would have it as I was cleaning up my put everything I don't have a place for drawer in my craftroom I came across a ziplock bag full of all these tiny little purple seashells. They were from the necklace we had bought my daughter while on a trip in Hawaii and at some point the string broke and all the shells fell off. We gathered all the pieces up (this was before I knew anything about jewelry fixing/making) and I promised I would figure out how to repair it.

It's been several years now, lol....and honestly I think we both forgot all about it. Then I stumbled upon them in that drawer. The purple color of the little spiral shells immediately struck me as a great color to pair with the copper wire idea I had gotten from my mom.

Here's the necklace I put together and although its nothing even similar to what the necklace of purple shells looked like before it broke, hopefully she'll like this too. Sorry my pictures are a little off in color - I just could not get the lighting right for taking pictures of this necklace. The purple hues are much more vivid in person.

The big shell in the center is from our family trip to the Outer Banks. Although it's just a piece of clam shell I love the deep purples that are exposed and thought it was a nice compliment to the other purple shells.

Part of the clasp is done in copper wire and the other end is a circular Swarovski crystal (a little extra special bling, bling!).

Thanks for stopping!

Playin' Around

Well I've been playin' around on my new torch and I'm lovin' the way it works...but I didn't start out lovin' it. I sat down so excited and figuring this was going to be a piece of cake....I've used one of these before (not thinking about how I wasn't the one setting all the equipment levels, that had always been done for me). The first night went way worse than I expected. I'd dip the tip of my glass rod into the flame and little bubbles would start forming and popping almost immediately....that's not a good thing.....I was burning the glass before I was even getting the amount that I needed heated. I tried everything from turning the propane and oxygen amounts up and down, to adjusting the regulators and just couldn't seem to get it to work. I ended that night pretty frustrated and a little lost as to what I was doing wrong.

I did take notice of a few neat things during this unsuccessful night of bead making. It's much easier to do an encased bead. A lot of my glass rods weren't as shocky in this flame, I'm not sure yet why this is though. I had much more stringer control and ability to work under the flame in the warming area. I could make beads so much faster too! So there were many good things that night but....I had to stop burning the glass before the rest was useful!

My next few nights went so much better. I got some help and changed a few of my settings on the equipment and turned down the propane mixture coming out of the torch head and worked a bit higher in my flame....SUCCESS! My glass wasn't bubbling anymore and things started going smoother. I really am lovin' every minute of it now. The torch is a good one (not that I have had a ton of torches to compare it to).

Here's my first set of beads on the new torch. I used Light Turquoise, Dark Amber, and Dark and Light Ivory glass. The beads vary widely in size (intentionally).

Front view - I really had a blast making these and love the results of the color combonation. I love the little bits of the transparent amber and the way the dark ivory reacts with the turquoise.

Back view - Turquoise is a great color to work with. Depending upon what other colors you combine it with you can get a variety of shades out of the turquoise. If you look at this set you can see this. There are areas that go from the original light turquoise color to an even lighter turquoise color. That happens naturally when these are made. I do think it has something to do with turquoise's reaction to dark ivory because it doesn't happen to the turquoise with all colors.

Ivory also creates some really great reactions when used. I actually used a mix of ivory in these beads. Both dark and light ivory were used. If you look you can see that light ivory creates a nice black outline around itself. Dark ivory creates more of a feathery black outline around itself. These things make these colors a lot of fun. Then I like to try to throw in a transparent color...it seems to really bring the beads to life.

This bead set quickly found a home in a bracelet design. It fits like a cuff bracelet but with the extra security of a clasp. I think with the exception of about three beads and two ivory spacers the entire set was used in the jewelry design.

I used 14 gauge sterling wire to create the clasp and string the beads onto. The jump rings are also made from 14 gauge sterling wire and silver soudered closed for strength.

A little closer view of the clasp. I also pounded the clasp lightly with my hammer to give it a diamond cut look.

I was thinking as I was writing this that I also noticed the colors of some of the glasses can come out slightly differet in this torch over my HotHead. The reactions in certain glass colors from their metals, like dark ivory, seem to come out differntly too. Oh and I did try out some frit...but I'm pretty sure that was unsuccessful as well. I know I burned the silver amythest frit, but I'm not sure about the czear blue...that seemed to work but didn't really turn the blue I thought it would....so I'm unsure. Frit is something that I haven't played with too much yet.

Well I'm off to relax...Friday is finally here! Have a great weekend and thanks for stopping!

oh and let me throw a plug in for my other blog since I have something new posted there too....check out Lumpy Page Designs for my newest set of stamped cards, they're sure to make you smile.