A blog dedicated to the creativity and the challenges of making and designing with handmade art glass (lampwork) beads.
About This Blog
This blog reflects the thoughts, passions and struggles of a glass bead artist whose day job is manufacturing food safe rubber stamps. I share the joys and challenges of making lampwork glass beads and rubber stamping. ALL images here are copyrighted unless otherwise stated and may not be used without permission!Contact Holly
Several amazing sales venues have popped up on Facebook expressly for artisan lampwork! I always share my current sales on my fan page there. But you can usually find me on any of the following groups:
More fresh glass... And back to the drawing board... what a crap sesh!
On the left, I was playing around with a flat stringer I learned in Corina's class...only I had to use a fussy, reacting, devitrifying pink in the middle... Just a piece of crap...
Then, I was trying my hand at Lori and Kim's Candy Jacks...using their cupcake murrini... can you even tell those are cupcakes??? I can't.... sigh!
The next silver glass lentil I like... and I like the cz candy jack... at least I can tell they are czs in there! But I used more of that fussy pink... ugh!
Different view...you can see all the divit... and the lack of definition in the cupcake.
Here is the crack in the lentil... compatibility for sure...dichro, fussy boutique glass...destined for a water bath!
And here's the CZ bead:
I've been on vacay in Louisiana with the pup...hope to be feeding some of these to Facebook in the next week.
These are the last batch of beads that I didn't get to photograph right out of the kiln as I was dashing to the post office. At set of rainbow big hole beads for Pandora style bracelets.
The customer who wanted the green witch boobies...took all that I made! I love when that happens!
And a focal that is so pretty in person but too shiny to photograph well...
I've managed to get sick on only my 2nd day of school... Not sure when there will be more!
It's rare that I sit down at the torch and make something just for me. I often end up with beads that are not my best - something that is off center or even has a crack (eek!). I make myself a necklace or bracelet and still get lots of compliments...it pays to be a walking billboard for your business!
But I've always wanted a bobbin bead. And knowing "my customer" so well, I knew it had to be purple. Gaffer's new Purple Rose and Royal purple seemed a perfect fit. Still those are pricy glasses so I used a much cheaper COE 96 for the core since bobbins use a fair amount of glass. I used another Gaffer glass - Chalcedony - in frit form for accents.
Once I had my bobbin, I knew I wanted it to sit on a necklace so I could see the metal so I went back to the torch and made a matching big hole bead. By threading the BHB onto the ribbon first and threading the bobbin over both ribbon ends, the bobbin sits flat on the necklace.
I've always like wearing unusual sized beads this way... this is an old silvered ivory necklace of mine:
Do you have an unusual way of wearing big hole beads??
--------------------
I'm participating in a Blog hop:
It's a lovely overcast Friday here... rain on the way... and the PERFECT cover for bead pics!
So I cleaned out my desk bead bowl... this is the one that holds beads to be listed that have been photographed but... they looked at the camera cross-eyed or they some mandrel poop on their finery. And so they sit and wait until I remember to take more pics of them!
And oh what treasures I found!
These guys have all posed for their close ups and are ready for me to get a move on a list them! I hope to get them all up on the glass bead site by Monday! Thanks, as always, for l@@king!
I got lots of questions about the terms in my last post. I sometime assume my audience is jewelry makers or other beadmakers when I know I have some quilters and knitters and just generally creative folks who follow along. So... I thought it would be fun to examine a few of the glassy words from that post. For you glassy folks that do this all the time, there's tips for making hearts and buttons here!
Today's word is Mandrel.
A mandrel is a rod of stainless steel which is used to form the hole in a bead. The rods come in a HUGE variety of sizes, hence the large variety of bead holes! I use tiny 1/32" all the way up to 1.5" mandrels. There are even a variety of shaped mandrels allowing for bead holes in fun shapes such as hearts, squares or ovals.
Mandrels are dipped in a liquefied graphite emulsion, called bead release, and allowed to air dry or dried in the flame. After the bead is made and has fully annealed, the beads on their mandrels are soaked in water to weaken the release. This makes removing the beads from the mandrels a little easier. After removal, the bead release is cleaned from the beads with a diamond bit.
Beads on mandrels, waiting to be soaked and cleaned.
The word mandrel came up in my previous post when I referred to an "OFF mandrel heart." This means NO mandrel was used to make the hole. Instead the bail (Another word for hole but generally refers to something to hang the bead from...usually on top of or behind the bead.) was made by the careful application of hot glass to allow for the hole.
I hold the heart, attached to a rod of glass called a punty, in my left hand; the bail glass is in my right. It is usually smaller- about 2 - 3mm. I heat the bail glass and spot heat the heart where the bail is to be. I touch down, move the heart behind the flame and keep the bail glass in the flame. As the bail glass melts, I move my left hand to bend the bail around the heart, leaving a hole. After the bail is attached I spend a bit of time adding glass where the bail may be too thin, reshaping the hole with a tungsten pick, melting the bail to the glass and making sure the bead hangs true.
The final way tungsten pick. Tungsten can get very, very hot...I'm talking glowing red. I keep the bead / button behind the flame and it's actually fairly cool. The pick is IN the flame and glowing. The pick gets hot enough to actually DRILL a hole in the glass! I use this technique with buttons.
Buttons with drilled holes.
So there you have it... All about mandrels and holes. I hope you'll check back here this week for some more bead makers vocabulary!
Yesterday, I told you with my obsession that led to making many ugly beads this summer. And through persistence (hard-headedness?), I finally got the kinks worked out. Here's my bead.
And here is what I wanted it for. Yep, I wanted it for my curly hair! A number of Etsy sellers actually sell their big hole beads as dreadlock beads. And since my hair gets caught in EVERYTHING, I thought it would be fun to have one of my beads for my hair. Plus, I've written at length about my idea of jewelry to wear is to just threading a bead on something andGO!
I can wear it all day. It's so cool and I get lots of commnets. And that mottled blue? It shows up so nicely in my auburn hair.
I'll be back here on http://hollysfollybeads.blogspot.com with my latest listings and more beady news. See you then.
Posts
