Well, this year, I decided to ask for a vendor’s table myself. I’ll be selling dyed silk ribbons, felted ropes, and hand-hammered silver, copper, and bronze components and focals. I’m so excited! I need to build up my inventory over the next few weeks, so I’ll be posting my creations here as I go. Wish me luck!

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Today’s post is brought to you courtesy of my new haircut.  I’ve been experimenting with hollow beads today:

Hollow CIM Chalcedony, DH Triton and Gaia frit, CIM clear dots.

Hollow Vetrofond Smoke Rings

Hollow CIM Sangre with Triton frit

Effetre transparents and opaques with Triton frit

Hollows: CIM Kryptonite with Effetre Periwinkle swirls, Unknown Frantz box pink with Effetre dark lavender swirls

The crowning glory! Trans grass green with leaf cane and applied flowers. On a hollow bead!

Fear not. You are not alone. I, too, feel the pain of PPS, and have for many years. Today, we have two sterling examples.

Example #1: The unidentified fuzz

Though this is not an irreversible problem, unidentified fuzz plagues those of us with PPS.

I’m fairly proud of this bead, which I made on Friday afternoon. It’s Sky Blue Effetre, decorated with Transparent Aqua stringer. The bead itself is hollow, built on the mandrel in two disks, which I teased together, allowing the air inside to puff the bead out to round. It’s about 12 mm in diameter.

Example #2: Random stuff in the background of the shot

These are my new murrini. Aren’t they nice? Also, random junk on my kitchen table, including the bead I took a picture of moments before.

1. About 1/4 lb of stringer, most of it slightly broken but usable.

2. A whole bunch of plain Effetre/Vetrofond transparents, including some 10mm rods I can use as punties.

3. About 2 lbs of plain Effetre/Vetrofond pastels, over half of which were light green or neon yellow (yuck).

4. About a pound of rods that were Odd Lots, Filigrana, or Premiums, including half a pound of Effetre 254, the Evil Devitrifying Purple. This was a surprise to me–I thought it was Heffalump or another CIM purple until I melted it and it devitrified on me.

So some bad stuff, some good stuff, and some great stuff. The EDP was worth more than the $15 I paid alone. I’m definitely going to have a good time melting all this glass.

I’ve been working all weekend on a sweater to match the Gansey Booties I designed for Gid. Sorry about the cell phone picture–I can’t find my camera.

I’m using the same Cotton-Ease as before, and I really like the fabric as it’s being knit up. I have enough of this yarn in stash to make three adult-sized sweaters and another two baby sweaters, so it’s a good thing it’s going well.  I have it in mind to knit a coordinating Gansey for Tim eventually, using some of the patterns from Gideon’s. Unfortunately, by that time, Gid will have outgrown this one, and I’ll have to make him another. Sigh. It never ends. I’ve decided that I need to acquire some self-knitting yarn and self-sewing fabric. That way, things might get done around here.

I torched a little bit on Friday, and I’ll post some shots of the beads when I find my camera. I’ve been trying out silver glass for the first time–just a little Psyche frit I picked up at Frantz in Shelton right after Christmas. So far, my results have been blah. I just can’t figure out how to use the flame chemistry on my Hothead to my advantage.  Pictures when I can.

These beads have a combination of Vetrofond Dark Ivory, Light and Dark Turquoise, Dark Grass Green, Light Transparent Grass Green, and Creation is Messy (CIM) Elphaba. I’ve been experimenting with various poking, raking, and swirling techniques, as you can see, and some things are turning out better than others. I particularly like the bead with poked Elphaba dots and the one with a faux vine made from raked Dark Grass Green dots. That technique needs a lot more work, though.

I actually got the clear to work for me without scumming or burning by turning my torch way down and working far out in the flame. It’s slow, but it works.

I initially titled this post “compatibility issues,” but I really hate the current usage of the word “issues” in that sort of context. I fall into it from time to time, because I hear it so often, but I hate it. Whenever a person says “I have issues,” I always think of the woman in the Bible who had issues for twelve years, and wonder what bodily fluid they’re referring to.

So compatibility problems. Yesterday’s torching session was extremely successful, from a design and productivity standpoint. I made 10 lovely, tiny spacers:

And three more complicated beads, also quite lovely. I was particularly proud of the lotus-style bead in the center:

But alas, see the cracks? All of my beads so far have been made with a practice set of glass I got from Sundance Art Glass, theoretically 30 random rods of Effetre. Not this clear–not only did it not burn or scum, the hallmark of Effetre clear, once cooled, it obviously has a non-compatible coefficient of expansion (COE). Physics being fairly immutable in the glass-melting game, CRACK.

Farewell, pretty beads. I will try to make you again sometime.

Spacers, striped spacers (practicing stringer control), and various ill-advised efforts at fanciness. All in Effetre from my practice glass stash. Nothing is annealed yet because the kiln is at my parent’s house, and we still have to figure out how to use it. For now, I’m sticking everything in a crock pot filled with hot vermiculite, and I plan to batch anneal anything worth saving once I’ve got the kiln going. So far, so good.