I have been making some lovely little beads recently and have often thought “ooh how lovely that would look if it were encased” and then I have immediately thought “ but if I do it then I will inevitably ruin it”.
Why? (I can hear you all asking in hushed and quizzical tones)
Because I am truly naff at encasing. I have tried every way I have found and have had the odd success but more through chance than by design. I have tried spiralling, splurging, splodging, dolloping and every other type of ...ing you can imagine. As a general rule I end up with a gigantic and lumpy bead whose core has blodged and bled and gone wonky and so it ends up in the dreaded fugly jar! So quite simply I haven’t really been encasing any of my nice beads and they just seem to lack a certain zing as a result. So this week I have set myself a challenge - well more of a promise to myself really; the challenge is to encase every bead I make (well 9/10 isn’t too bad a success rate).
I have found myself a good tutorial that I like and know works (because my mum used it and she is now great at lovely thin encasing) and have started off by making a series of plain beads, progressing onto gravity beads using frit so if I smudge it then it won’t matter too much, and also the colours won’t bleed too much into the clear if I over heat it. Also I have found with the gravity beads you can make them quite small and round as base beads so you aren’t left with a wonky leviathon of an end result!
I have been heating up a little nub of glass at the end of the rod and then “splodging” it onto the cool bead and then squishing it on to the bead with the graphite marver whilst it is still hot. Once I have enough clear on the bead then I warm up the outer skin and manipulate the thicker bits of glass around the edges of the bead with a chisel ended red hot poker (from Carl Martin). I then work slowly around the bead squishing the glass with the marver and spreading it evenly and uniformly over the bead. I have found that by trying to nudge a little bit of glass at a time means that the central core never gets too hot and thus doesn’t distort too much. Finally I have then heated the entire bead as much as I dare to ensure a round smooth finish.
To date I am really quite chuffed with my progress and have produced some really nice shiny beads as a result. I am really glad that I decided to commit to this challenge otherwise I could have just pottered along making pretty beads that would never reach their full potential because I was too scared of ruining them with a bad encasing job.
I am now proud to announce that I can confidently encase my beads and nothing can stop me now. I will point out that I chose the shortest week that I could with the nicest ending to it possible (Flame Off) just in case it all went horribly wrong and I needed some serious cheering up at the end of the week!!
The tutorial that I used as a basis for my encasing is by Charmaine Jackson (Encircle Designs) and is available via Etsy www.etsy.com/shop/encircledesigns
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