New Beads and Experiments

You can get one for yourself at Amazon, new and used.

I am great at buying books on glass bead making, and love to page through all the prettiness, but haven't used them recipe style.  I was cleaning the very back corner of my kitchen, and found a cook book stand that I don't use. Aha! It works great down in the bead room!

I picked a couple "recipes" that seemed to fit my skill set (from left to right): fish scale, zig zag, and rainbow. The rainbow beads use two colors of transparent.  I learned that the two transparent colors needed to be distinctly different or you won't see the rainbow effect.  All of these were great beads to  make to practice dots size control, which I need lots of help with!

Even the wonky beads I feel compelled to keep - squishing them into a barrel and adding dots to make the most of the glass. 

I also spent some time on my own experiments.  Last Christmas my father-in-law grabbed a twisty off of my torch area while mixing a martini for my mother-in-law (drink mixings are stored under the sink in my studio :-)) and I panicked a bit - I didn't want the glass to shatter in her drink.  I decided to make twisties, fashion them into olive picks and then anneal them in the kiln to make them safe.  What do you think?  Hard to make them pointy but not sharp (if that makes sense) but olives are forgiving.