Sea Foam and Banana Cream

The long discontinued Creation is Messy Sea Foam is an opal glass in a fresh, minty green. The level of translucency (or opacity, depending on how you like to look at these things) depends on how long the beads spend in the kiln and whereabouts they are positioned in the kiln. This means you can end up with a batch of beads all made from the same glass but that are all a bit different from each other which is really nice. They're quite ethereal.

I've put aside some of these Sea Foam ones so I can make a shimmy bracelet with them. I was fully intending to do that this morning with my extra bonus clocks-gone-back hour but when I got all my findings out I was peeved to discover I've run out of some of the jump rings I need for the job so I've ordered those and they should be here on Tuesday.

I made a few spacers with another discontinued glass - Vetrofond Banana Cream. Not only is the glass long gone, but the company is too. A fellow lampworker, Palala Beads, kindly sent me some yellow glass a couple of years ago and two of the rods were Banana Cream so that's how I came to have some. The glass is a bright but at the same time slightly muted yellow. Remember foam banana sweets? That colour.

The Sea Foam and Banana Cream spacers are available in my shop.

I'm off to plant my spring bulbs now. I've gone for daffodils, some green tulips, purple crocuses and mixed muscari. Oh, and I got three of those big alliums just for novelty's sake. One of the nearby neighbours had a 'free spring bulbs, please take' table out on his lawn the other day so I snagged a bag of those too. I don't know what they will be so that's a mystery bulb bonus, isn't it? Cheers, kind neighbour man.

It's sunny here in Cambridge but also nicely chilly. Lovely. I hope the sun is shining wherever you are? Enjoy your Sunday! 

A trip down muscle memory lane

Up until Thursday I'd not made an oak leaf headpin for five years. I approached the task slightly nervously because I was pretty convinced I'd forgotten how to make one but within two attempts my brain and hands had remembered exactly what to do. It was almost like I was watching someone else dab on the glass here, swipe it there, shaping and coaxing everything into an oak leaf kind of shape. Then I was off and away, muscle memory well and truly jogged.

I make my headpins in different ways, depending on what wire I want to use for them. The acorns I make on the end of a mandrel. This is because I'm working with a glob of glass that requires shaping by gravity and for that I need something sturdy to work on rather than a thin bit of wire which results in the acorn bit boinging about far more than is desirable. After the acorns are cool and cleaned I epoxy in non-tarnish antique bronze finish copper wire. I make my oak leaves straight on the wire because the shaping and clean-up of them is easier that way. Because the wire I use for the acorns has a non-tarnish finish I can't put it in the flame so I use bare copper wire for the oak leaves. (This already feels like way more information than anyone wants to know about this process but I've started so I'll finish.) This results in acorns with brownish coloured wires and oak leaves with bright, shiny copper ones. To make the shiny copper wires less shiny I give them a bit of a patina with some liver of sulphur. This darkens the copper and makes it less blingy. It's a very simple process but my word does it stink! It's like being stuck in a lift with a group of people from the Hard-Boiled Egg Sandwich Appreciation Society conference who’ve been eating egg sarnies for the whole weekend. Honestly, I cannot describe how egg-farty the stench of liver of sulphur is. It does the job, though, and fear not, the offensive scent gets washed off in the clean-up.

This morning I turned the finished acorns and oak leaves into necklaces.

I've only made five and they're in my shop at the time of typing, but if they sell out I'll make them available to order for a while.

I made some actual beads this week too.

These are CiM Little Boy Blue encased with a thin layer of Effetre Super Clear 006, decorated with spots in Effetre White 204. I never tire of the 'floaty' spots thing. There's one set of these left in my shop.

And I've also made another chain maille bracelet. This one is the 'Sweet Pea' weave which creates these little clusters linked to one another.

The bracelet is pure copper and it's available in the chain maille section of my shop.

Headpins

I made a little batch of headpins this week. My propane was running low and that affects any stringerwork or surface design and makes it go a bit feathery so I made a couple of fancy headpins until the feathery thing started happening and then I switched to plainer ones until the gas ran out.

Yesterday I turned the headpins into a pendant and some earrings.

The pendant was made with the fancier headpin which has a petal-like design on it:

Then there are these lavender earrings:

I love the way the CiM Wisteria reacted with the Effetre Lavender Blue 247 to create that purple band.

The other three earring pairs are made with headpins and globes of glass that are one third Effetre Light Turquoise 232 and two thirds CiM Fjord Milky. Again, the two glasses reacted with one another, making the turquoise go all mottled and cloudy. I kept one pair really simple and hung them from flower earwires...

...and I paired the other ones with copper findings and hypoallergenic niobium earwires.

The remaining pair aren't really headpins at all - no pins, so just... heads? I attached some sterling loops to these and dangled them from sterling drop shapes. These earrings are really light and swishy.

All of these are in my shop at the time of typing.

I still haven't been able to track down the winner of the prize draw so Tina G, if on the off-chance you're reading this, please contact me so I can get your beads to you. If I've not heard back from you by the end of November I'm going to do the draw again.

CiM Testing: Goji

Goji is the perfect name for this colour. It’s a goji berry orange-red that is not transparent enough to call transparent but also not fully opaque.

I didn’t strike the glass as such; I just made beads with it in my usual way so if there was any striking it would have happened while I was rounding up the beads and adding the spots.

These beads have a core of CiM Creamsicle encased with a thin layer of Goji. There are slight colour variations towards the holes where I moved the glass with a brass tool, and this normally occurs with reds, oranges and yellows, but they barely show. 

The glass was smooth to work with and it didn’t shock or bubble.

The spots on the beads are CiM Quetzal and the spacers are CiM Peacock Feather.

The beads were photographed outdoors on an overcast day.

CiM Testing: Pizzazz

I’d been trying to save this one because it’s purple and purple is my favourite colour and for some reason I’d decided I had to keep it until last as some kind of treat but then my friend Jelveh asked me if I’d tested it yet and so I caved. 

Pizzazz was an attempt to recreate Jacaranda which was a transparent purple that had a hint of mistiness about it. Pizzazz is mistier than Jacaranda.

I’ve gone around the house with the beads trying them under different lights to see if the glass shifts colour to a more blue tone but most lights we have are LED and they don’t induce the same colour shift thing as older style lighting and fluorescent lights do so I can’t give a definitive answer on that one.

The glass itself was fine to work with. No shocking or bubbling.

For these beads I used the Pizzazz as a thin encasing layer over a core of CiM Heffalump. Because of the slightly foggy quality of the Pizzazz I thought I would get some sort of stringer reaction happening so I opted for Effetre Light Turquoise 232 stringer to test this and NO! No dark reaction lines or feathering. I really heated the scroll bead seeing if I could get a reaction line (a darker line running through the centre of the applied stringer) to happen but nope, it stayed crisp and clean. Interesting.

The purple spacers here are plain Pizzazz.

The beads were photographed outdoors in between rain showers on this frankly miserably-weathered Saturday.

CiM Testing: Aquamarine Ice Milky & Misty

These icy blue opals are a re-engineering of CiM Poseidon. The photo above shows Aquamarine Ice Milky on the left and Aquamarine Ice Misty on the right. As the names suggest, both are translucent but the misty version is a bit  more transparent.

Aquamarine Ice Milky encased in clear, with white spots

Aquamarine Ice is a really lovely shade of blue and for for the milky version I encased it with a thin layer of Effetre 006 Super Clear and applied spots of Effetre White 204. The spacers are plain Aquamarine Ice Milky.

Aquamarine Ice Milky encased in clear, with white spots

I hardly ever encase the CiM opals and I don’t know why. I think it must stem from my beginner beadmaking days (before CiM was a thing) and it was an absolute no-no to consider encasing any of the Italian opalino and alabastro glass because it would crack, so I think I got it into my head that it would be the same with the CiM opals. However, on the few occasions that I have encased the CiM opals I’ve not had any troubles.

Aquamarine Ice Milky encased in clear, with white spots

This round of testing I decided that I was going to use the misty and milky opals for my more usual type of beads instead of plain hearts or un-encased rounds. I’ve added the thin layer of clear as a barrier so that any decoration stays neat and clean because the opals have a tendency to make stringer and spots feathery and wibbly. That’s fine because you can use it to your advantage, like I do for my ‘batik’ style beads, but more often than not I like my dots and lines to be as crisp as a Krisproll.

Aquamarine Ice Milky encased in clear, with white spots

When testing the Aquamarine Ice Misty I thought I’d put some beads with white spots in the kiln – as a sort of sister set to the Aquamarine Ice Milky ones – but no. Obviously some knobhead (that’s me) picked up a stringer of CiM Birchwood halfway through making them so some of the beads have white spots and some have ivory ones, and now I’ve ended up with two trios instead of the intended set.

Aquamarine Ice Misty, encased in clear, in the sunshine

Aquamarine Ice is a proper blue sky blue and when the sun shines through the misty version of it it’s very swimming pool on a summer’s day.

I didn’t find either version of this glass at all shocky and it wasn’t bubbly or scummy. Really fab.

Aquamarine Ice Misty encased in clear, with ivory spots

Both versions are lovely but Aquamarine Ice Misty is definitely going on my glass shopping list. Hopefully I’ll be able to nab some.

All photographs were taken outdoors in the shade unless otherwise stated.

CiM Testing: Douglas Aster

Douglas Aster may sound like a character from an Agatha Christie novel but it’s actually a little daisy-like flower that has pale purple petals.

Creation is Messy’s Douglas Aster is a very pretty opaque pale purple that has a tiny hint of translucency to it. Only a bit – enough that when you pull it into stringer it’s not quite fully opaque.

It melted with no troubles and for these beads I encased it with a thin layer of Effetre Super Clear 006 and added spots of CiM Lapis. The spacers are just plain Douglas Aster and Lapis.

The beads were photographed outdoors in daylight.

CiM Testing: Almandine

Almandine is another cloudy transparent. It’s the same as Lake Baikal but with way more red pigment which has resulted in this burgundy kind of colour. Unusual and very nice.

Again, no working issues.

Almandine will only be available at L’Age du Verre.

The beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Lake Baikal

This is one of CiM’s cloudy transparents – transparent glass with cloudy transparent pigments added to it – and it’s a beauty.

Lake Baikal is a transparent blue with red and pink pigments that give the blue a soft purple glow when the light hits it just right. It’s flipping lovely.

More hollows because I was in hollow bead mode, or to be more precise, refining hollow bead mode, and figuring out how to get consistent results with them. I get like this with certain beadmaking techniques.

Hollow beads made with various CiM colours

I’ve always been quite hit-and-miss with non-blown hollows and occasionally I like to buckle down and spend a while trying to figure out why the misses occur. It’s always a good exercise in learning how glass works and calculating what you have to do with it (or not) to get the results you’re after.

Anyway, Lake Baikal is a really well-behaved glass and a gorgeous colour. Nice one, Creation is Messy!

All beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Streamers

The new Creation is Messy Streamer glasses are all transparent with stripes of various opaque colours running the length of the rod. When used they result in ribbons and wisps of colour suspended in the glass.

I’ve put these together in one post because usage wise the Streamers are all pretty much the same. They melt smoothly with no shocking, hazing or bubbling. Great to work with.

This glass needs to be used carefully to get the best out of it. You can’t just slap it on the mandrel all cattywampus (I recently discovered that word and I’m so pleased I was able to just use it) and expect it to look great. You need to wrap it or layer it on with care so that the streamers can stream.

I feel that this glass lends itself perfectly to discs and hollows due to the way these types of beads are constructed. I opted for hollow beads and all of the ones pictured were made with the two disc method, not blown.

Sea Anemone

Transparent pale purple with orange, yellow, green and white streamers

Prometheus

Clear with red-orange, orange and blue streamers

Solar Storm

Clear with red-orange, orange and purple streamers

Bird’s Nest

Clear with orange, yellow, green and black streamers

Bewitched

Clear with indigo and purple streamers

Carefree

Clear with green, purple and blue streamers

All beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Jacaranda

Obviously I was going to love this glass because it’s purple.

Jacaranda is like a less translucent/more transparent version of Crocus.

Jacaranda is transparent in rod form but it developed a soft mistiness as I used it and it has retained this after annealing. The effect is really pretty.

The rod was ever so slightly shocky in that it fractured several times but not enough to send fragments flying. Apart from that it’s fuss-free.

These beads are CiM Foam encased with Jacaranda – three with a thin layer and three with a heavy one – and the polka dots and spacers are CiM Lapis.

The beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.