Practice, practice, practice.

Following my few days of glassy fun I couldn't wait to get at the torch and put what I had learned into practice.

This is my kiln haul.

First off Double Helix Clio.

Clio is a striking and reducing silver glass that is capable of producing lovely hot pinks. Unfortunately not for me. I know that my friend Linda is having the same problem. I tried several combinations of layering colour but mostly got orangey brown.  The two small lentil beads that are darker weren't encased. So encasing makes a difference. I did get to practice my encasing and played with my small lentil press and new ribbed bead roller. So all was not lost. Sue and Sally made it look so easy so what am I doing wrong?

I knew that I would still need a lot of practice to crack stringer work so just kept working at it.  I got quite a good spiral on the first bead.

Petal Beads

A while back I bought a tutorial for making Petal Beads from Magma Beads.  I had a couple of goes but each bead took me an hour and ended up huge. When I went to Sally's I asked her if she could show me and her technique is slightly different so I thought I would have a go.

The bead on the left is still quite large but the depth is lovely. I managed to refine the black and white bead so that it was a bit smaller, now I just need to practice on the dots.

I'm still a bit unsure as to which colour dots of glass will show up the best so made a couple of quick test beads.

The top bead left to right is Effetre Baby pink 256, Effetre Cool green tea 680, Effetre Dark Periwinkle 222, Effetre periwinkle blue 220, Effetre dark tourquoise 236, Effetre light tourquoise 232.

Bottom bead left to right: CIM Sherwood, CIM chalcedony, CIM plum over white dot, CIM eggplant over white dot, CIM eggplant.

Most of the Effetre colours showed up fairly well except the cool green tea which was very pale nearly white.
The Cim colours weren't very impressive even when layered over a white dot. The sherwood had a bit of a dark centre to the dots.