A bead within a bead

It’s a classic exercise in heat control:  make a spacer bead and then form a mandrel-wound hollow bead around it.  The balance between keeping the whole thing warm enough not to crack, but not so warm as to melt and collapse, is tricky.  If you succeed the result is a bead inside a bead which makes a most delicious rattle when shaken.

I’ve tried to make the bead-in-a-bead off and on for a few years but it’s only been recently that I’ve succeeded.  It’s quite fun to make the outer bead in clear and put some prismatic dots on the outside.  They’re quite hard to photograph well, though.

A handful of hollow beads

These are a couple of group shots of the best shard-wrapped hollows I’ve made over the past couple of weeks.  I promise I’ll move on from the hollow obsession soon, but today please indulge me one more time!

A handful of hollows, which demonstrates the scale of the beads:

And another group shot, outside:

A group shot of recent work

Last weekend I spent some time sorting the good beads from the bad beads and the really bad beads.  The size of the good pile was humbling in relation to the size of the other piles but it was fun sorting through a year of work.

As part of the sorting I strung together the various sets I’ve made with complementary spacers.  Here’s a group shot of some of the best sets:

And now for something completely different…

Modern technology is amazing.  I’ve been playing with metal clays recently – silver, copper, and bronze suspended in a soft workable material.  It can be formed in any way that clay can and after it dried it is fired in the kiln to burn off the clay and fuse the metal.  The result is a solid metal piece that is far more intricate than anything I could make without learning how to do lost wax casting.

This is one of my first silver clay pendants:

This pendant features a purple cubic zirconia as a focal point.  Since zirconia is lab-formed at very high temperatures, it can withstand the 1200-1500 degrees Fahrenheit heat that metal clays require for firing.  Semi-precious and precious stones would shatter at those temperatures.

I learned how to make this pendant from the lovely book Metal Clay for Beaders by Irina Miech.

Testing: Terra2

This weekend I started playing with a new Double Helix glass, Terra2.  Their original Terra is one of the most fabled glasses in lampworking existence.  It had a reputation for striking easily to an entire rainbow of colors.  Unfortunately the formula was difficult to duplicate reliably and Terra has been out of production for a few years now.

I never had a chance to try it.  Terra’s heyday came and went while I was on break from lampworking.  So, I can’t compare Terra2 to its predecessor but I have been putting it through its paces to see what I can get it to do.  Here is one of the first pieces I made, a hollow heart bead:

For reference, that’s a little smaller than the hollow shard beads I’ve been making lately.  I’ll eventually grab a photo of it in my hand for scale.

I’ve found Terra2 a bit difficult to strike effectively.  It tends to turn lovely blues and purples right as it’s first melted, but the heat applied during the shaping process tends to overstrike it to muted pastels and then to plain tan.  A deep reheating will start the striking cycle over again as you can see from the purple patch at the bottom of the heart pendant.  However, if an entire piece is reheated that much it’s hard to maintain the shape.

Terra2 has a reputation for doing wonderful things under a clear encasement, so I made a 3/16″ big hole bead encased with Aether:

This bead definitely turned out more on the overstruck/pastel side.  It’s not a bad effect, but I’d like to figure out how to shape Terra2 beads while obtaining the full range of colors.  I’ll experiment more with it this week…

More hollow beads

Here are more of the hollow focal beads I’ve been making over the past couple of weeks.  This one is made with transparent Effetre topaz, Reichenbach iris gold powder and a random twistie made from silver glass odds and ends.

And this one is another hollow with a base of Double Helix KA-356 glass covered in Psyche and clear shards.

In other news, I posted a few items in my new Etsy shop this weekend.  Check it out:  http://sakuraglasswork.etsy.com.

A pea bead

I’m still obsessed with making hollow beads wrapped in shards.  There are a bunch of them waiting to be photographed and a few still in the kiln annealing.  In the meantime, here’s something completely different for a change of pace.

This is a tapered 1.5″ barrel bead.  The base glass is Reichenbach 104 iris green, and it’s decorated with dots of clear and a long spiral of Gaffer Chalcedony stringer.  Iris green, like all of Reichenbach’s iris colors, reduces in a low-oxygen flame to a lovely mirror finish.  The reduction stuck better near the stringer for some reason.

This bead’s primary purpose was to experiment with the iris green glass.  It was only after I cleaned and photographed the bead that I realized it looks like it’s covered in peas.

The joy of putting holes in things

If you ask a beadmaker why they make beads, they might ponder for a moment and then tell you that they love jewelry or wearable art or some such thing.  Upon introspection, though, there is a deeper drive which unites those of the beady persuasion: we are obsessed with putting holes in things.

A standard lampworked bead is made from molten glass wound around a stainless steel rod (AKA mandrel) which forms the bead’s hole.  There are other ways to transform an ordinary lump of glass into a bead though.  Behold:

This is the result of a recent tool acquisition – an octagonal graphite reamer.  It stretches a hole from a tiny pinpoint to 8-10mm wide.  This opens up all sorts of design possibilities for off-mandrel pendants.  No more is the fate of a piece dictated by how cooperative the fickle, fickle pendant loop is feeling that day.

These pendants were both made with DoubleHelix’s latest amazing glass, Clio.  The teardrop has a base of transparent cobalt and the rectangle has a base of coral.  Both were encased with TAG Clarity, a clear with many of the same wonderful properties as DH Aether (and a similarly hefty price tag.)

Double strand Clio necklace

Before I made beads I made a lot of jewelry.  Lately I’ve been getting back into it and enjoying incorporating my own beads into finished pieces.

Double Helix, one of my favorite glass makers, recently released a new glass called Clio.  It is a finicky yet endearing glass, something like its feline namesake Cleo.  This glass does different things in response to slight variations of heat, flame chemistry and other glasses.  It strikes to tones ranging from peach to strawberry to raspberry.  It also develops a blueish haze that can be subtle or dramatic.  You can make a dozen beads using the exact same process and they’ll turn out totally different from one another.  It’s the nature of the glass – better to work with it than to fight it.

This necklace contains 19 straight-sided lentils made with a base of Clio, lightly reduced and encased with clear glass. Each lentil is 18mm by 11mm.

In between the lentils are rainbow matte brown delicas which nicely offset the peach, raspberry and mother-of-pearl flashes in the lentils.  Finished with sterling silver crimp beads and clasp.  The necklace is 18 inches long.

Hollow madness

Shards and hollow beads were made for each other.  Hollow beads are light enough that they can be very large without becoming unwieldy to make or wear.  Shards, which are created from a glass bubble blown very thin and shattered, need a lot of surface area to really work their textural magic.  Thus, shards and hollow beads area natural match.

This week I’ve been playing with handblown silver glass shards and hollow beads.  It’s somewhat technically challenging to make both shards and hollows.  The process of applying shards to a bead is simply magic.  The shard folds itself onto the bead as if it were silk, and it stays like that even through the intense heat needed to make silver glass do its thing.

Shards and hollow beads are great inspiration to work with colors I don’t use often like red and orange.  There’s even an outside chance I might make a yellow bead later this week…