CiM Testing: Unicorn

Unicorn is a translucent opal white that plays nicely and works really well with stringer. The silver core bead here is decorated with scrolls in Effetre Periwinkle 220

Unicorn is a really good base glass and it would work well for sculpting too – not too soft, nor too stiff.

The beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Chocolate

Although you can’t really see any cloudiness here, Chocolate is one of CiM’s new cloudy transparents. It’s a true dark chocolate brown. The cloudy transparency allows a certain amount of light to shine through the bead but at the same time the glass appears mostly opaque. If you were to use a thin layer of it over something else it would act like a dark transparent and you’d get a less saturated brown.

What’s lovely about this glass is that when used on its own, like I’ve used it here, it’s a true dark brown and it has no streakiness like actual opaque dark brown glass often gets.

Another trouble-free glass. No working weirdness to report.

The scrolls on these are CiM Toto.

The beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Vintage Rose

Vintage Rose is one of CiM’s new cloud colours. It appears somewhat paler once worked compared to how it looks in its original rod form.

In the photo above you can see how these cloudy glasses work – repeated layers of clear/pale transparent and a colour, so that when it’s melted you get a translucent misty cloud effect.

This colour is a delightful, soft, powder pink blush. Lovely! I decorated the bead with scrolls in Effetre White 204.

Vintage Rose was fine to work with – no fussiness or shocking.

The bead was photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Goldfish

Goldfish is a transparent deep orange that reminds me of neat Aperol, and it’s lovely. It’s a striking glass, meaning that it requires some cooling and reheating in order to bring out its colour. The rod is already orange (some striking colours don’t look anything like their ‘finished’ colour, or are much paler) but I managed to make it a tad darker orange during the strike.

The glass melts really smoothly and I had no bubbling or shocking.

To get a nice even, uncloudy strike you need to heat the bead until it is uniformly transparent – no streaks, wisps or foggy bits – and then let it cool outside the flame for a bit. At this point I reintroduced it to the flame and added the Effetre White 204 scrolls and just working in the gentle top part of the flame was enough for the strike to occur without me even trying. If you’re keeping the glass undecorated, just carefully reheat it in the top half of the torch flame until the colour blooms.

Goldfish is quite similar to CiM Clockwork.

The bead was photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Summer Haze

Summer Haze is the same hue as Lemongrass but it’s one of CiM’s misty opals so it’s less translucent than Lemongrass. It’s definitely got that opalescent glow to it when the light shines through it.

Summer Haze is totally unfussy and a pleasure to work with.

The silver core bead above is Summer Haze with CiM Monarch scrolls and the heart below is Summer Haze with Effetre Yellow 418.

The beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Glow in the Dark

Glow in the dark stuff is always kind of magical, isn’t it? From those stars that you stuck to your childhood bedroom ceiling, through to watch faces and even nail varnish, there’s always that moment of “Ooooh!” when these things actually do glow in the dark.

In rod form, Glow in the Dark is a hazy clear and when you melt it it goes a bit bubbly. The glass is quite soft but not at all shocky.

It played nicely with stringer; I used Effetre White 204 for the scrolls on the silver core bead.

The actual glow is a greenish-blue and it really lights up. I ‘fed’ the two beads light with the torch on my iPhone before I wedged myself into the porch cupboard to capture their glow in a photo.

The photos aren’t great because it was dark and I was using a macro lens (which needs light) but you get the idea.

What a fun glass! I really enjoyed playing with this one.

The non-glowy beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Blueberry Muffin

In rod form, Blueberry Muffin looks like a very dark indigo-purple. It was engineered to be an opal version of CiM Lapis. When I took these beads out of the kiln they’d lost their purpleness and instead they are a very dark navy blue. Such a lovely colour!

These beads are just solid Blueberry Muffin – no layering so they are very dark but I guess you could desaturate the colour a bit by layering it over clear or white or whatever.

The scrolls on these ones are Effetre Light Turquoise 232.

Blueberry Muffin melted with no issues.

The beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Toothpaste

Another of CiM’s spearminty blue-green translucent opals. It’s very similar to Persian Green in both the way it looks and how it behaves.

Love the glowy thing it gets when the sun shines through it. Gorgeous glass.

The scrolls on these are Effetre Periwinkle 220.

The beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Lemongrass

Lemongrass is a translucent pale yellow. The glass is quite soft to work with but it’s very well-behaved.

The silver core bead is a base of Lemongrass decorated with scrolls in CiM Monarch.

The stringer worked well on the Lemongrass base.

The heart bead photo below is just Lemongrass on its own. A lovely glass.

The beads were photographed indoors in natural daylight.

CiM Testing: Persian Green

I called this Persian Blue in my Instagram stories yesterday so my apologies for being a doofus. I blame living in Cambridge because you see this colour everywhere here and it’s pretty much what’s called Cambridge Blue, the colour used by the University’s sports teams. They call it blue but it’s definitely quite green. (Picture the wellies of the Cambridge Boat Race crew. They’re definitely more green than blue, aren’t they?)

Anyway, colour confusion aside, Persian Green is a spearminty bluey-green which is like a paler Kryptonite. It’s a trouble-free translucent glass that melts smoothly. It’s more green in some lights and more blue in others. That’s not to say it magically shifts colour; like many glasses it looks different depending on what kind of light it’s in.

The glass works nicely with stringer to give the batik effect that I like so much. The scrolls on this one are Effetre Periwinkle 220.

The bead was photographed indoors in natural daylight.

Silver Cores, Socks, Plants & Steps

I've been making big hole beads and I've been silver coring some of them. This isn't the first time I've done this - I've just dug out this post from 2007, and this one too, where I describe the tricky process of bashing silver tubing about with a hammer and dapping punches whilst it's surrounded by a glass bead. If you're thinking that sounds bad, it was, hence why I never made any more silver cores. I had another go at uncored big hole beads in 2008 as you can see in this post but clearly I lost interest very quickly after that.

I think what's made me have another go at big hole beads is the fact I've been making larger beads. I recently started faffing with the disc shaper I bought about three years ago but had never really used, and I found that going up a mandrel size (from 1/16" to 3/32") made the shaping of them easier. Using larger mandrels always results in making larger beads. I needed a big hole bead to turn one of the discs into a necklace so I dusted off my 5mm mandrels (I do love mixing my imperial and metric measurements) and had a play. I always say that the glass never stops teaching you things and I can tell you that I've learned a lot about the way glass moves since 2008 and now I find making neat, non-wonky big hole beads much easier than I used to. Back in 2007 I wanted to make a scrolly silver core bead but I never got there but I made this very thing happen last week. Never stop trying people! Practice and persistence goes a long way.

My friend Kathy (go look at her website and fall in love with her skill and brilliance) kindly let me borrow her bead liner so I could have a go at silver coring my beads and aaahh, the relief. Simple physics and pressing the silver into place works way, way, way better than beating the shit out of it with heavy tools. Now I can't stop making big hole beads and coring them. I'm only about ten years behind the times, and the local Trollbeads shop in Cambridge closed a few weeks back but hey, I catch up in the end.

In other news...

I cast on a sock on Saturday afternoon. I've not knitted socks for yonks. I've made several hats recently, none of which have been blocked or worn, but on Saturday I got the sock urge. My friend Shona (who works in a wool shop - can you imagine?!) sent me some yarn last year and one of the balls was this Opal sock yarn. I've never knitted with Opal before but it's working up lovely.

I must remember to post a photo of the finished pair when they're done.

I've become slightly houseplant-obsessed. My parents-in-law gave me an orchid a while back and after some reading up on orchids I managed to keep it alive all through its dormant season and it grew two new flower spikes and bloomed again. In fact, its still got flowers, although it's started to go over a bit.

This is Harold. Isn't he pretty?

Then my friend Jen gave me a camellia for my birthday. I can't see myself harvesting its leaves to make tea because they are so beautifully green and glossy, so it lives inside and is obviously happy because it did its first flower last week. Such an amazing scent!

I then got myself a chain of hearts plant to sit on top of the tall bookshelf, and shortly after that I bought my annual cyclamen plant. That's dormant at the moment but I'm looking after it in the hope that it blooms again. It's growing new leaves so that's a good sign.

I've also recently acquired a succulent and an aloe vera. I've come to think of all of these houseplants as botanical pets, all with their own characteristics, quirks, likes and dislikes, and I'm enjoying tending to them and learning about them. Our tiny lounge looks like a garden centre now but I like it.

Finally, I'm on a roll with my daily step count. I did RED January where I ran every day for the whole month and I made sure I did at least 10,000 steps a day which meant that on the days where I'd only run 1.5 miles (about 3000 steps) I went out for a walk later in the day to make my steps up and I managed to stick to my step goal for the whole month. Although I loved running every day in January, I do like my running rest days, and it's sensible to have them, so I've not been running every day this month, but I have been keeping up with doing at least 10,000 daily steps.

What I loved about RED January was the positive effect it had on my mental health. Running every day gave me a challenge, lots of endorphins and most importantly, I think, my own time to switch off from everything. We all need to do this. We spend so much time plugged into the internet and social media, staring at screens (she says, typing a blog post) and getting caught up with other people's lives and goings-on, that sometimes we forget to take a breather. Even though I'm not running every day, I treat my walks as I do my runs - on both of them I leave my phone at home, or if I want to listen to music or an audiobook or podcast I take my phone with me but switch it to do not disturb, and I don't check it while I am out. If I use my phone to photograph a duck or a flower or whatever, I ignore any notifications I see on the home screen, take the pic, and put my phone away again. This is all doing wonders for my brain. I've seen a significant reduction in my anxiety, my mood is way better and I don't get as stressed out as easily as I used to.

At the end of last year I was living in a near-on constant state of anxiety and I was having panic attacks two or three times a week. I'd been living like that for a couple of years and it was horrible. I was due to begin CBT for PTSD at the start of this year but on the day of my first CBT session I woke up in a really good mood. The thought of going to meet a total stranger and having to splurge out all my darkest experiences and thoughts to them, inevitably resulting in uncontrollable sadness and much crying, seemed absolutely mad to me, so I called and cancelled the appointment. I made myself a promise to carry on with my daily runs and walks while switching off from the world and that if I felt myself losing control of my anxiety I would sign up for CBT again. I've only had one panic attack so far this year and I was able to calm myself down by doing some exercises that I read about in a PTSD CBT book I bought, so it's going well thus far.

It's not easy to get 10,000 steps in every day when you work from home and hardly ever have anywhere to be except a 6' x 8' shed, Tesco Express or the Post Office queue. The challenge and resulting feel-good satisfaction of making my Garmin's step counter turn green every day is some kind of magic.

Two more

Here are another two silver core beads. One is similar to the one I posted last night and the other is one of my enamel beads.

I'll tell you what, parting with these is going to be quite tricky. I don't usually spend that much time with my beads. By that I mean that I normally make them, clean them, photograph them and then they're away off to new homes in various parts of the world. But these little glass gems get a considerate amount of my time and attention lavished on them after the cleaning process. I talk to them while I'm doing the silver coring thing, normally pleading with them to turn out okay and not to smash! Then I sand, clean and polish the silver core and finally the completed bead gets a bath and a good buff with a polishing cloth. These are pampered beads indeed!

But I realise that I do have to part with them and I'm sure that they will go to extremely good homes. I was going to wait until I had a huge mountain of silver core beads before I started selling them but I've had a bucketload of emails asking when they're going to be available so I shall start the ball rolling tonight and these two will be for sale on my website at 8.30pm (GMT) this evening.