Gahhhhhh.  After over 2 years of not touching my lampwork torch I'm going to try and make beads again.  I'm expecting it to be a long and painful process of trying to re-learn everything it took me 7 or 8 years to learn in the first place.  Darn.

In the meantime, none of my passwords work, Etsy has changed pretty much everything about their check out system and I forget how to take and edit beads pictures.  Can I go home now?

Just in case anyone out there is listening, wish me luck and keep and eye out for an update in a week or two.  If nothing happens in that time, then just assume that I gave up.

Take care,
Carey

Ornate Lampwork Beads in a cascade of Neutrals

I had a custom request for a series of ornate shaped beads in various neutrals and I really need to keep track of the various glasses I used so I decided to put it in a post (starting from the left): Effetre Oliva Nera encased in clear, Effetre Straw Yellow encased in Double Helix Aurae, CIM Seashell with white dots, Effetre Mocha, Effetre Sage Green (etched), Lauscha Caramello (etched)

Starting from the 2nd bead from the left:  CIM Khaki, CIM Cottontail encased in CIM Chateau, Effetre Fossil, Effetre Straw Yellow, CIM Cookie Dough (etched), CIM Antique Lace.

And finally starting from the 5th bead from the left:  Effetre light Ivory (etched), and CIM Cottontail over clear.

CIM Mink, CIM Maple, and Effetre Antique Green

What's not to love about a rich, dark honey amber mixed with pastel turquoise and green. These colours look great on everyone and go with pretty much everything.  I could make them over and over (and have made them quite a few times).

This set is made with three CIM colours.  The warm honey brown comes from CIM Maple and CIM Mink and the pastel green is CIM Sprout.  The lovely soft turquoise is Effetre Antique Green.  I'm not sure why it's called green because even though it is definitely a turquoise colour, I read it a little more blue than green but either way it's a beautiful colour.

A few comments on CIM Maple.  This is a very interesting glass.  It is a dark clear transparent amber in rod form but goes kind of milky or opalescent when melted.  It is very stiff but still very easy to work with and the final result goes back to a very transparent amber.

Also some nice silver line reactions between the Antique Green and Maple.  It's hard to see in the pictures but if you look closely at the green bead near the front in the first picture, you can just make out sparkly bits of silver around the blue dots.  Very pretty in person.

Transparent Purple Effetre Ink Blue and CIM Ink Blot

I'm in a bit of a transparent purple mood.  Something about very dark transparent colours layered with tons and tons of clear glass just seems to have a very clean, elegant look.  I'm also experimenting a little with sizes and shapes and working on my fine stringer.  Not as good as I'd like to be yet but not horrible either.  This set is made with Effetre Ink Blue which is the brighter purple and CIM Ink Blot which is the darker, slightly bluish purple.  Both are lovely glasses and very easy to work with.  

This set is made with Effetre Ink Blue transparent, Effetre Medium Yellow Green and CIM Dirty Martini.  The encased dot beads turned out pretty nice and the stringer designs need a little more work but aren't bad.  I've layered the transparent purple 2 or 3 times from the bottom of some of the beads to get a gradient effect which I really like ( you can see it much better on the left most bead in the below picture).

CIM Dirty Martini and Effetre Dark Grey

I love CIM Dirty Martini.  In fact, if I had to chose, I would say that it was my favourite glass colour.  I was worried for a little while that it might go out of production because Creation is Messy (CIM) was making a lot of similar greens in limited edition colours.  I assumed that they were trying to make Dirty Martini and not quite getting it but thankfully it is still a regular edition colour.  It is a pale, very grey toned green.  What I would call celadon and it goes fabulously with grey and white and pretty much any other colour you can name.

My camera didn't really like these colours, I guess because they're so neutral.  In person, the Dirty Martini is greener than showing in the pictures but other than whiting out the background, I've chosen to do very few adjustments to photos just to save time and frustration (the adjustments never seem to come out the way I want).

This set of beads is made with CIM Dirty Martini (surpise!), Effetre Dark Grey pastel, Effetre Dark Grey transparent, Vetrofond Crystal Green, and Effetre White.

Pretty in Pink and Orange CIM Tiger Lily and Effetre Light Pink Pastel

It is sooo cold here in Toronto.  I know it's winter but wow this is really really cold.  This set of beads was intended to help fight the winter blahs.  A gorgeous bright vivid orange from Creation is Messy called Tiger Lily.  This is a beautiful orange.  Not too red, not too blue, clean with no streaking and very easy to melt.  Love it.  It also plays really nicely with the other colours which include CIM Oyster Mushroom, Effetre Light Pink Pastel, Sage Green and Pale Blue transparent.

Well, that took longer than expected

I'm finally back to the torch and have a few new bead sets that I'll be listing tonight.  I'm not really sure how my 3 months away turned into more than 9 months of missing in action.  I just couldn't seem to work up the interest in going back to the torch which is a problem since I have tons and tons of glass that needs to be used up.  Hopefully, I'll be able to do a bit more regular work and even post to my blog (this here one) once in awhile.

One of the things I've decided to do is simplify as much as possible.  I'm only taking 3 pictures of each bead set and then the only adjustments that I'm making are to white out the background (grey dingy backgrounds just drive me nuts).  As per the above picture, I think it looks pretty nice and it lets the beads and their colours stand out a lot more. 

This set was made with Effetre Ivory, Sage Green, Sandstone, and Dark Brown trans and CIM Adamantium, Double Helix Khaos and TAG Fire Lotus.  Lots of rich earthy colours for a nice tribal effect with hints of silvery swirls.

I'm off to Etsy to list beads now and I'll be back soon to update on glasses and colours.

A little bit of black glass goes a long way

Sooo, I was feeling a little uninspired and decided to go to one of my favourite sites: design-seeds.com.  After looking around, I decided to try and make a set of beads based on the above palette.  Why?  I'm not really sure.  I've been using a lot of green and yellow so I just think I was in the mood for something a little more neutral (plus the dog is adorable).  I chose 5 glass colours because I thought the first and last colour were pretty similar and I went with: CIM Butter Pecan Unique 5, CIM Chai Unique 3, CIM Eggplant, Effetre Black and CIM Lichen.  This is basically 4 very light to light colours with black.  I thought the set would be light and airy with small hints of black to add detail.  I sat down and made 13 beads and ended up with this.

Now keep in mind that these are very brightly lighted with studio lighting and come across a bit darker in real life.  As far as I was concerned these beads were too dark.  Not the light and airy concept I was shooting for, especially the beads in the back row.  So back to the drawing board or in this case the torch to make 7 more beads without any black glass at all.

Yes, this is more like it.  I kept the front row of beads which had just hints of black and added the new beads and got something much softer and lighter in tone.  They remind me of vintage French linens in soft cream, pale sage with hints of plum.  There was nothing really wrong with the first set of beads except they weren't the look I was trying to achieve.  Although when I look at them now, they actually do seem closer to the inspiration picture. Oh, well.  Here's the final set.

Bright, Spring-y slightly Easter-y

First off, I really didn't set out to make an "Easter" set of beads but I seem to have done it whether I meant to or not.  Second, I should really know better than to assume that the colour of a glass rod will have any resemblance to how that glass looks when it's melted.  And third, opal glass doesn't really etch all that well.

These colours looked different enough in rod form to make me think I was creating more of a "batik" style of bead.  They all melted a little brighter than I expected and changed my batik to an Easter especially the orange colour.  This is CIM Creamsicle Unique 2 and in rod form it looks like a slightly orangey yellow.  Once melted, it became a slightly yellowy orange which might not seem like a big shift but really changed the look of these beads.

This lovely pink colour is Reichenbach Opal Raspberry.  This colour changes a bit depending on your light source.  It looks much bluer in natural light and much oranger in indoor lighting.  This makes it somewhat hard to photograph since studio lights are very very bright incandescent lights which give this pink a very warm hue.  The good thing is that it's a lovely colour either way so you can go too far wrong.

As for the rest of the colours, we have CIM African Gray (a warm, almost chocolate gray), CIM Elphaba (a medium tone, neutral green), and Effetre Sky Blue.

Feeling very Pastel-y

I have a real thing for pastels and neutrals.  As much as I love colour, there is just something about a pale, smokey colour that I find incredibly appealing.  Not so much what I would call "baby" pastels which are colours with tons of white mixed in but take the same colour and throw in a drop of black for that misty effect and I'm there.  Now many people looking at the above set would wonder why I'm calling bright yellow a pastel.  Well, it's not really but I have a tendency to read yellow as a neutral and when paired with these other creamy neutral beiges the overall effect seems very clean and neutral (to me anyway).  The pictures are a little darker than real life (I'm still playing around with Adobe Light Room and haven't quite achieved the effects I'm looking for but am still much happier with the pictures than I was before - thanks, Holly) but they still give a good idea of how these colours blend together.

Once I started I couldn't stop and ended up with even more shady pastels in this set.

Soft pastels in blue and green mixed with warm vanilla latte beige and a chalky beige brightened with a blast of yellow.  I could not like this colour combination anymore if I tried.  And I think the beads look amazing all strung together.

They have a really simple but summery look to me; a leather cord and a simple spacer and a clasp and away you go.  For the record, these sets are made with CIM Vanilla Latte, CIM Antique Lace, CIM Dirty Martini, CIM Sepia Unique, Effetre Misty Blue, and Effetre Medium Lemon Yellow.

Hey, quick new note here.  I noticed when loading my pictures onto Blogger that they seemed much darker than the original.  A quick internet search found the reason, Google is auto-enhancing my pictures which to them seems to mean making them darker.  I went to setting and turned this off and low and behold my pictures are back to normal (still not quite right but much better).  Here's a link for anyone with the same problem:

Remodelando la Casa: Dark pictures in Blogger

Favourite Colours Effetre Chestnut and CIM Dried Sage

A set of beads in some favourite colours.  There's just something so soothing about soft, grey-toned pastels and warmer browns and corals.  It's that rich, earthy quality and it works so well on all skin tones and with so many other colours.  This set came about after the completion of a customer order because I just couldn't stop myself.  

These sets are made with CIM Dried Sage, Effetre Light Chestnut, Effetre Red Roof Tile, Effetre Dark Grey opaque, Effetre Sage Green, and Effetre Grey transparent.  I love this CIM Dried Sage.  It's just a slightly grayer version of Dirty Martini  but enough to give it a really earthy effect.  It works so well with these warmer colours and provides just the right contrast.

St Patricks Day and Design Games

Like a lot of other people out there, I've been feeling a little blah lately.  Uninspired, lazy, and I'll admit, a little disgruntled (according to my husband, I'm never gruntled so that's not a surprise).  Anyway, I decided to make something bright and cheerful and, with a last name like mine, you have to try and get into the St Patrick's Day spirit so I felt that green would be required.  

But this time I decided to give myself a bit of a challenge.  I would use green, grey and white but I could only use the green to make dots and the grey to make lines (white could go either way).  I actually went the other way when I started but I found out on the first bead that this green doesn't make very good lines so I switched them.  I figured this would be easy but I was surprised at how many times I wanted to make a grey dot.  If you look at the bead on the right, you'll notice that it has a white line ending in a green dot.  I really really really wanted that dot to be grey.  I debated putting a grey line there but I didn't feel it would enhance the bead so in the end I stayed with my challenge and used green.  And I loved it.  No way would that have looked better as a grey dot although I know for sure I would have made it grey if I wasn't playing my little design game.  I think I'm going to have to come up with more of these design games and see where they take me.

For the glass people out there, this set is made with Effetre White, Effetre Light Grey op, and CIM Elephaba.

Boring Pictures

I'm finding myself really frustrated by my pictures these days.  It seems that in order to get the colours more accurately represented, I have to go with "flatter" pictures.  Less vivid and sort of blah like the above picture.  Oh it's not a bad picture but it doesn't really have any spark to it.

In the past, I've tried spicing up the background with props and different colours but I often find this to be "busy" and it can sometimes even detract from the beads so generally I tend towards plain old white backgrounds.  But I'm bored with plain old white.  So once again, I've decided to try and work some background design into my pictures.  I've been looking at a lot of packing designs and gift wrapping ideas on Pinterest and trying to get some inspiration.  Here's one of my favourites. 



Nice clean, simple, elegant, fairly neutral so it doesn't overwhelm visually.  Here's my first attempt at this type of background style.

Not perfect but a little more visually interesting than my first picture.  I need to play around with different layers of material and paper and, of course, this would have to be modified to suit the colour of the beads.  The text is a stamp that I bought awhile ago mostly because I really liked the font.  I also got a stamp maker for Christmas so this another area that I will have to explore in terms of design features.  This could easily take over my life.

For gallery type images, I'm trying to add a little texture but still get a really up close image of the beads.  So far, I'm liking this style.

Rustic grey wood with a macro focus on the beads.  You can't really see much about the set except for the bead in the middle but I think it still conveys a fair bit of info about the set.  I'm not sure I'll ever be completely happy with my pictures because I always think the beads look prettier in person but I guess I'll keep trying.

For anyone interested in glass colours, these beads are made with Effetre Light Rose, Rubino D'oro, Light Rose transparent and white with some light and dark grey in the focal beads.

CIM Antique Lace, CIM Muskmelon, CIM Cake Batter, CIM Green Tea, CIM Alley Cat, CIM Weimaraner, CIM Raindrop

I just got a whole new batch of glass with some relatively new colours from Creation is Messy.  So pretty.  This set contains CIM Antique Lace, Muskmelon, Cake Batter, Green Tea, Alley Cat, Weimaraner, and Raindrop and a little bit of Effetre Pale Aqua.  I really like these colours and even more, I love how they work together.  Nice clean lines, little to no reaction or fuzzing.  And a soft spring-like palette.

These are the disc beads that belong to this set; starting from the left is Muskmelon, Antique Lace, and Cake Batter repeating in that order to the end.  Soft, whispy pastels with hints of green and pink.  I had a little bit of shocking with the Muskmelon but it seemed localized to one rod so it might have just been an odd air pocket or something.  Alley Cat is a wonderful, intense orange that was a joy to work with and Weimaraner is a dark, slate grey with hints of blue.  Green Tea is a lovely, lovely green.  I usually tend towards the olive or sage greens and am not always a fan of the brighter, true greens but this one is so pretty that I couldn't even etch it.  Raindrop is a medium transparent grey.  It looks a little purple to me in rod form but after melting seemed to lose that and become a fairly neutral grey.  It seemed to me to be a good match to the Weimaraner.

Oops, I almost forgot Cake Batter.  This colour reminds me of Butter Pecan Unique #4 in that it is a very pale, off-white with hints of greenish yellow.  It is a wonderful base colour and works so well when you want something a little more mellow than white.

To Etch or not to Etch

I have a tendency to etch my beads.  Etching can often brighten colours and help create a more distinct impression especially between colours of a similar shade.  It can sometimes soften colours as well (depending on the colour) and create that velvety beach glass look.  I can honestly say that etching has saved more than one set of beads that I've made that would otherwise have looked pretty blah.  But then again, glass is shiny and smooth and often transparent.  You loose these qualities when you etch glass and that is sometimes a bad thing.  The worst thing is that you can't always tell if etching is going to make a bead better or worse or pretty much even.  

This latest set of beads had some difficult choices for me.  I thought that I would etch all the beads but I liked some of them so much when they were shiny and that I just didn't have the heart to do it.  In the above beads, I only ended up etching 2 beads, the grey and orange bead and the transparent aqua bead.  I had an especially hard time deciding about the green bead.  Normally, I would etch a transparent bead like this in order to enhance the design work but the green is just so pretty (CIM Green Tea) that I couldn't bring myself to do it.  I also really liked the little bubbles that got caught in the glass while I was making the bead.  Below are 3 beads from this set before I etched them.

And then here they are in the set after being etched.  The bead with the orange stripe is the first bead at the top left, then the pale bead with the small orange dots is third from the left and the bead with the grey stripes is third from the right.

In this case, etching did improve the look of the beads.  The matte look helps make the designs stand out and gives some depth to the transparent dots on the pale bead.  I think that in this set, the mixed approach is working for me.  It also gives a bit of textural variation which I also like.  Well, no hard and fast rules but I'm thinking that if I really like a bead the way it is then I should probably leave it alone, otherwise, why not etch it?

Effetre Antique Green and faded cottage chic

Boy, it's been awhile since I've updated this blog.  It has been a real wintery winter here in the Toronto area and I have the blahs.  In a effort to brighten up my outlook, I made of set of beads with some of my favourite faded beach colours.  Warm sandy beige, earthy sage, and pale watery turquoise.  This set started with one of my current favourite colours, Effetre Antique Green.  This is a pale watery turquoise that can look either greenish or bluish depending on what you pair it with.  In this case, I've added Effetre Sage Green (this is the machine pulled version which although isn't quite as nice a colour as the hand-pulled, doesn't explode on me when I use it), CIM Vanilla Latte, an incredible warm, creamy beige and CIM Butter Pecan Unique #4, a very pale, off white.  Altogether, they give that wonderful, slightly sandy, cottage chic effect.

I just got a boat load of new glass so I'm hoping to be posting new sets in the near future.

The Wonders of Black and White

I just finished a custom set of beads in black and white (and clear) glass and I couldn't help but appreciate how nicely these two "colours" work together.  I would absolutely describe myself as a colour person.  My first forays into art involved glossy, intense oil paints in vibrant hues mixed and melded to create even more colours.  Even when I sketch I tend to use coloured pencils so black and white isn't really a natural for me but every time I use it, I love the bright, clean, graphic results that can be achieved.

They're great glasses to use when trying out new techniques, too.  First, they aren't as horrifically expensive as some of the other glasses and they tend to work really well together.  They stay clean and don't blur and react the way some other colours do.

Also, I know that Effetre Black is actually a very dark purple but I like the way you can see that hint of purple when it's layered very thinly.  It gives the black and white beads a little colour which I find a bit more appealing than plain black and white.

Inspiration - Lampwork Beads

It's finally getting colder here in Canada and I've been feeling a little blah as a result.  So I started looking around for inspiration for new beads and found it in one place unexpected and in an old favourite.  Let's start with the favourite: design-seeds.com  This is a fantastic site for colour inspiration.  It is in fact, all about colour.  Beautiful photographs and lovely colour palettes to go with them.  I used this photo:

to create these two sets of beads:

Glass used in these sets include Effetre dark sky blue, antique green, oliva nera, dark chestnut, coral (sorry I have no idea which coral) and CIM Vanilla Latte.

And then for my unexpected inspiration.  I received the latest catalogue from Knitpicks with a gorgeous picture of their new yarn, Diadem.  So from this picture:

I created this set of beads:

Not quite as purple as I was shooting for but I really liked how they turned out.  The rich jewel tones with a cool, frosty vibe.  This set was made using Effetre transparent dark aqua, dark violet, dark turquoise, white, CIM glacier, and rainforest.  I kind of wish I'd put a bit of pale grey into the set but otherwise I was pretty happy.  Well, hopefully there's more inspiration around the corner.

Effetre Bright (Electric) Yellow

Effetre Bright (sometimes called Electric) Yellow is my all time favourite yellow.  It is technically a transparent colour but it quite often goes translucent when worked which creates a stunning cloudy, swirly yellow.  This colour is as clean and clear a yellow as you'll find anywhere.  No orange or blue tones, no brown murkiness, just a bright, true yellow.  Obviously with a colour like this a little can go a long way.  This set first started with thoughts of yellow and grey but I wanted to mellow it out with some caramels, browns and beiges.  Frankly, it turned out almost exactly as I pictured it in my head and that's pretty rare for me anyway.

For those bead makers interested in colour combinations this set of beads contains:  Effetre White, Effetre Bright Yellow, Effetre transparent Grey, Effetre transparent dark Grey, CIM Maple, CIM Adamantium, and CIM Vanilla Latte.  I did encase the Vanilla Latte in two beads and they seem to be fine.  I think some of my past cracking problems had to do with putting the beads in the kiln too cold.  I warm everything up a bit now right before plopping them into the kiln.