Beads for sale

Ok, this is going to be a short post. One of my goal for the month was to put up three items for sale. I decided instead of posting fully finished pieces of jewellery  I'd post beads, tiny piece of art you can wear everyday!
These are beads I'm show casing.

this is one of my favourite beads I've ever made. It took over an hour. It is a petal implosion beads with silvered ivory stringer for decoration on the top. THe colour called pumpkin, it's a pinkish orange. I'd like to charge 20$ for the bead. It's about 3.5cm by 2cm by 1cm

This is a set of coral/ivory beads. There are 5 in the set. They are about 1.5 cm.  Since these beads a quite a bit faster to make and take less technic I'm charging 10$ for all six.

These beads remind me a bit of fossils. They are made with metallic black glass and iris orange (raku) The raku changes colour depending on how it's cooled and reheated. The focal bead has also dichro glass. The focal beads mesures   3cm long. The other two beads aren't quite the same size, one is 3cm long and the second is 3.5 cm long. For the set I'd like to charge 20$

Sometimes I feel that beads are a bit pricy, but then I remember they are ting pieces of art. Later this week I plan on posting about prices. They are something I have been very conflicted about.  These beads will also be posted on a Canadian craft site. Wish me luck!

Clio jewellery

Ok, here are the items I've made so far with the clio beads, plus what I did with the etched beads from an earlier post. most of these do not have clasps yet. I will be buying those this weekend at Carlos LIttle Beads shop. I don't have time to order them online and would rather not buy them at Michael's. I want these items to be as unique as they can be.  There are a couple views of the same necklace. Not my great pictures but I took them this morning before heading to work. I might add captions later. Let me know what you think!

 

 

Clio glass

I started playing with my new glass I received this week. The glass I was most excited to try was clio. It's a glass by Double Helix. This glass is a striking/reducing glass. Which means you need to heat/cool the glass repeatedly followed by a few seconds in a gas rich flame. If you overdue the heat or the time in the gas flame you get a muddy icky colour. It is very easy to over due the heat, this is a tricky glass. When I decided to buy it I was worried I would be wasting my money as this is an expensive glass. (85$ for a pound! I only bought a couple if rods)  If you get the timing right you get rewarded with very dynamic colours. The glass starts out a transparent amber, check out what happens when it's heated.

this is clio over clear ( sadly this one has a touch
of muck on the back but it does't seem to take away from the bead)

clio over clear with mood swing grit

clio over white

clio capped with black

clio over white

clio over pumpkin

clio over transparent yellow

 

















These beads turned out really well. I did a lot of research oh how to use clio glass last night and this morning before tackling it.  Apparently clio is wonderful over transparent orange, but I have nothing like that colour so I tired yellow and red. The red bead ended up look very blue, still nice, but also have a few mucky areas, so there is no picture here.  I LOVE the pink and orange tones this glass give off. When over reduced you get some of the blue/green tones. Now I have to decide what to do with these beads. Any ideas?

troll beads - clio over clear and over white

Here is an update on one of the technics I have in my goals. The implosion petal bead. This one turned out a bit like a pine cone.  The blue one is a hollow bead. I didn't do any stringer work today as the clio beads took up most of the day to make. I think I will post a few of them on a craft site instead of trying to make something with all of them.

I will probably turn this bead into some kind of long woodsy necklace.

Now that I understand how this technic, I need to work on the shape of the bead. I am imagining a necklace full of different colour and sizes of this bead.  

  

Let me know which bead is your favourite!

First tries

In this post I will share a few pictures so I know where my starting spot is.

I made a few beads with stringers yesterday and again today. I think this goal is going to take a while to master.

Here are the beads I made yesterday

The first few beads in this series did merit being in the picture. I have already figured out a ton about the heat of my torch. I need to work on my lines being more stable and not melting in the stringers while I'm applying more on a different section of the bead. I pretty much put the stringer where it wanted to go. 

Today I had more success with the placement of the stringers and I could control the heat enough not to melt the stringers I wanted to leave raised. My lines are still squiggly. 

My second lampwork goal is  to learn the implosion petal technic. These beads take a loooooong time to make. I am pretty happy with the way they turned out considering they are my first attempt. They take about 20-30 minutes each. 

 You can kind of see the petals, it looks way better in life. I need to work on my photography stills, or get a better camera.

A different view of the red one

   Here is a green a blue one, you can see the petals better.

   This a black one, I thought I was using intense black, but it turns out it was just normal black, you can tell because normal black is really very very very dark transparent purple.

I like these beads, I will see what other things I can do with this technic. Let me know what you think of these beads! Any colour combos I should try with them?

I also made a few cabochons, they turned out ok. I was hoping they;d be a bit more round, but I don't think my glass pieces where quite square when I cut them. Now I just need to decide what to do with them. 

I have not posted anything yet for my sales goal. I was thinking of putting a few bead sets up,  maybe someone else wants to make something from my beads. This would be a good point to mention that pretty much everything on my blog/site can be for sale.  Maybe I'll post a few of my implosion flowers. Now is have to decide what to sell them for.

I did make it out for a run today, you can barely call it that. Just as I was leaving I got a text from a friend. She wanted to meet for coffee at Tims. So I ran to Tims, I convinced my friend to go for a walk while we chatted. Our walk ended up being an hour. Then I ran home from Tims. Total running time-about 11 minutes. I'll go for longer tomorrow.  Oh, I did go to fit camp so I did get a good workout in.