All sorts of beads

Eeeeehehehehe....Another lampworking post. By the way, I really do giggle like that when I lampwork, because I loves it. Certain steps are becoming easier, and it's really great feeling like I'm learning something again, doing research and practice, and seeing the improvements (however slight!)



From left to right -

Gaia encased in clear - I'm really pleased with this encasing because there's no apparent bleeding of the core glass into the encasing layer. On the other hand, the core glass was meant to be a reactive glass, and instead it stayed a lovely but plain emerald green, and I also used Effetre 004 clear for the encasing; the scummiest clear known to the glass world!

Colbalt Transparent rolled in silver foil with a Pale Blue Transparent encasing - I love this effect, even though there's less encasing, and more intermingling of the glass! The silver foil has also fumed a bit, I think, where the 'encasing' is shallower, but where it's silvery, it's lovely.

Colbalt Trans rolled in silver foil with clear encasing - same as above, but the encasing is better except for a few spots where the clear layer had gaps in it, and the base colour was drawn up through them. Quite cool appearance though; I know some people do this on purpose to get a more dramatic effect.

I'm not neglecting polymer clay though - I made a kaleidoscope cane a few days ago and produced these (and as you can see, I may be learning lampworking and kaleidoscope caning, but my photography skills are staying pretty level at the 'what on earth is that in the picture?!' stage):







And I've put them up at Continuum Designs


I've mostly stayed away from kaleidoscope (or mirror-image) canes because getting an aesthetically pleasing colour mix *and* mix of components has proved quite challenging. However, I was reading through Carol Simmons' blog (a master of complex caning) and found an older post about experiments using only a monochromatic colour scheme. So I forgot about colour and stuck to tones of blue, with some white and black, and concentrated instead on putting together the canes - and it really helped, thank goodness.