Vintage Circus Beads with Vetrofond Odds

 

These beads were inspired by the colours of vintage circus posters.  Colours that are typically very vibrant such as yellow, orange, and turquoise but now have that soft, faded patina that comes with time.  This poster in particular had the look I was going for:

 

 



Beautiful faded greenish turquoise, warm oranges and yellows and pale pistachio greens.  To try a attain these colours, I've used the following Vetrofond glasses: Yellow Ochre, Sunshine ODD, Biscotti ODD, and Candy Corn ODD.  This pale, slightly greenish turquoise is Effetre Antique Green.  All the colours were a pleasure to work with, melting easily, no shocking and mixing/ blending with each other very cleanly.  My one small negative comment would be about Vetrofond Sunshine ODD.  It is a very pretty yellow, bright but with a greyish tone but it has strange black flecks that appear in the beads but not on the rods.

The flecks actually kind of work with this set of beads since I'm going for a faded, worn, vintage feel and they'd probably be fine in any organic style of bead but it you were going for that clean, precise look, you'd be very frustrated by this glass.  And I don't think it's an over heating issue.  I work on a Nortel Minor and typically use a very low heat which gives me more control but tends to make everything take a lot longer so I don't think that it's anything that I did (but obviously I could be wrong about that). 

On a positive note, I'd like to say that I love this Candy Corn ODD orange.  It's a warm, mustardy orange that is almost a terra cotta colour.  It goes a brighter orange up against the blues and green in this set but still manages to retain a bit of that faded, yellowed orange feel. 

There's a lot of detail both on the top and along the sides of these beads.  Making them into pendants would be a nice way to see a bit of the side details and shown here:

I also think these beads would look fantastic with carnelian.  It would compliment the colours and bring out the dusty orange in the beads.

CIM Poison Apple & Key Lime Pie

 

This set of beads just screams summer to me.  It reminds me of a really nice drink that my mother makes during the summer that has lime sherbet, gin, and ginger ale.  It's bright and refreshing and sweet and tangy.  I've used all CIM glasses for these beads starting with Poison Apple, a lovely translucent green; Key Lime Pie a vivid, lemon-lime opaque glass which is part of their limited runs; and Mojito, a very pale, lime transparent glass.  As you would expect, the three citrusy greens come together wonderfully and create a really, "look at me" set of beads.



 

I think these beads would look great with beige and taupe or any type of grey.  Of course, you could always add bright green crystals and go for broke.

Favourite Beads - CiM Peaches & Cream

It's hard to say that you have favourite beads because, of course, you like all your beads and you wouldn't sell them if you didn't think they were great beads.  But some beads just seem to stand out for one reason or another.  They're a little more creative than others, the colours just seemed to work unexpectedly well, there's just that certain something that you can't quite put your finger on but, wow, you really like those beads.  Because of this, I've decided to catalogue some of my favourite beads in my blog.  It's an easy way to capture information and pictures, it's a nice way to share and, well, they're my favourites and I just like to see them out there.

This set was made with CiM glasses Peaches & Cream, Ginger and Peachy Keen and it's just peachalious.  The Peaches & Cream glass is a translucent glass that lightens and darkens depending on how long you work it and how long it stays in the kiln.  It is the base of all the round beads and it creates a wonderful light to dark peach effect not unlike peaches themselves.  I didn't know that this was going to happen so when I pulled these beads out of the kiln I was pretty amazed.  They're decorated with Ginger, a beautiful pale pastel peach which is easily in my top 10 favourite glasses and Peachy Keen, a lovely transparent peach both from Creation is Messy.

Warm, juicy and so flattering next to the skin. What can I say, these beads were just sooo peachy.  This set was sold to a very nice lady from Australia who posted her own pictures on her Facebook page here: www.facebook.com/SylviaBalleriniJewellery

New beads..at last

 

 

I finally made some new beads yesterday for the first time in about two weeks.  Not really sure why I've been so blah about making beads but it's been hard to get myself motivated.  I practically had to chain myself to my work station to make these and it felt like a struggle for every beads which is not normal.  Usually I love to sit down and mix colours and styles and see what pops up.  Anyway for all the effort it cost me I think this set turned out quite pretty.  I'm calling them "Peppermint Creams" because they remind me of those sweet, sugary mints that just dissolve in your mouth.

 

 

These beads are made with 3 lovely glasses.  The first is a limited run glass from CiM (Creation is Messy) called Sand Dollar.  This is a beautiful pale, opaque grey glass with hints of beige.  Depending on the light, it could also be called a very pale taupe.  Next is an odd lot glass from Vetrofond called Lemon Meringue light which is a lovely pale yellow that tends to blush to a darker lemon yellow.  You can see this most clearly in the little disc beads and the dots on the rounds.  Finally, one of my favourite glasses is dark lavender from Effetre.  A vibrant transparent purple that works wonderfully with these paler pastels.

 

 

 

All in all a pretty set of beads, kind of sweet and sugary and hopefully the start of some regular beading on my part.



I hate blogging and I haven't even started yet

I am not going to discuss the weeks of my time that I have lost and will never get back trying to configure the look of this blog.  I am done with that.  I am moving on with my life.  My original intention was to setup a blog to help promote my lampwork beads and discuss some of the ins and outs of making said beads.  Somewhere along the line I lost track of that intention and decided to become a web developer.  Arrgghh. Just shoot me.


Even as I'm writing this, I decided to change the colour on my blog title so I did.  I seriously need help.

OK, enough of that.  My name is Carey and I make lampwork beads.  I've been at it for about 7 years and I've sold beads primarily on eBay and Etsy.  I've recently downloaded some of my pictures to Pinterest and Flickr and will be linking to these sometime in the future.  I'll also be updating my Profile and adding info there and probably changing colours and layouts and widget/gadgets, etc.  I really just can't seem to help myself but in the interests of getting at least one post actually posted, I'm going to ignore my urge to configure and focus on these beads.

This is my most recent set of lampwork beads.  I bought a new graphite marver from Pegasus Beads in the UK and I just love this shape.  The ridges allow light to flow through the glass from different angles and create a lovely, airy effect even when the beads are quite large.  This set reminds me of frosty, coloured Popsicles where the colours are bright and sort of see through but not quite. 

 

 

I've used CiM's (Creation is Messy) Peaches & Cream glass in all of the beads.  Four of the beads have Peaches & Cream encased in pink, green, blue, or yellow transparent and three have pink, blue, and yellow encased with Peaches & Cream.  The beads that have been encased with P&C have an interesting antiqued kind of effect.  P&C is a translucent colour so it is sometimes opaque and sometimes a bit more transparent.  This means that sometimes the bottom colour shows through a bit and sometimes it doesn't.  You can see the effect best on the blue bead at the top.

 

Another thing I found interesting was when I encased the Peaches & Cream (which, as you can imagine, is a peach coloured glass) with a coloured transparent glass, the coloured glass typically changed or tinted the P&C so it's a bit more pink or a little more orange that type of thing.  This happened with all the colours except the blue.  For this bead, you can clearly see the blue glass on the outside and a very distinct peach glass on the inside which I think really looks neat with this particular shape.

 

Anyway that it's for now.  I'm off to find out how to add multiple blog pages and customize my pages menu and possibly put posts into pages.  I may never publish another post but if you check back you can probably see constant changes to how this blog looks.  Yeah.