Wednesday 26 January 2011

"Cool" Experimenting Part II - Looks Like a Win!

Yesterday I was making more beads with E cool Fossil. I decided to wrap it up with silver foil, and the result is shown on photo 1. Maybe, I needed to heat it more, but the shape of the base bead was so good that I was reluctant to make it back into molten glass. So it just darkened without producing any amazing effects. But don't worry, we bead artists are inventive when it comes to decorating. I wound some twistie left from the previous session (which, if I remember, was E cool Fossil and DH Aurae), paddling it down firmly, and then applied several chips of my murrini (this one is E Ivory with R Dark Multi). As the R stripes decided to be rather dark and didn't want to change into any other colour, I applied dots of DH Aurae with a stringer, reduced them to give this metallic effect and then decided to stop and put it away.

Next I had a better idea. Using just the Fossil on its own gave me quite a dark shade, which I wasn't entirely happy with. So I made the base bead with E Ivory and then decorated it randomly with Effetre cool Fossil, melted it in completely and kept on heating the bead up to the point when the middle of the bead started to move. It took me some time, but the result was great: the Ivory together with Fossil started "to break", the two colours interacting with each other, creating a lovely stony pattern. I cooled the bead down a little, shaped it and applied three murrini chips around the middle of the bead. The rest was even simpler: heat the middle of the murrini, poke it with a spare mandrel (that's what I do anyway), apply a large drop of crystal clear on top of the indentation, heat and watch how the bubble apprears. The very last bit was to apply some dots of DH Aurae (why is it always Aurae - oh, I've got an Aurae stringer right here!) and to reduce them a little. How more organic can you go?

Photo 3 shows a close-up of this lovely marble effect. The hand-pulled murrini here consists, if I remember correctly (I really need to start putting it all down for my next book), of Effetre Ivory, Intense Black, Double Helix Aurae (again) and somewhere there there is also Effetre Med Amber encasing it all. I've already got a name for them: "Stone Blooms" (Rod helped, as usual).
I was so busy that I'd run out of prepared mandrels! But I've still got to work out how to make nice beads with Effetre cool Kiwi...

Yesterday I found out that I'd won a lovely prize from Jane Tyrrell, a talented jewellery designer who lives in the UK. It was very kind of Jane to organise this giveaway prize draw, and I was thrilled to be pronounced one of the two winners! (A big Thank You to Jane's son!!!) So now I can't wait to see the lovely necklace designed and made by Jane, and some beautiful cards handmade by Jane which she will be posting to me. I was so happy that I went to Jane's Etsy shop (www.etsy.com/shop/janesgemsandjewels) and bought some more of her cards - they are really pretty!

A great day!




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