Time Out!

Arrgggh I can't believe how long it has been since I last blogged.

Well I have good cause not to have blogged TBH - have gone back to uni and am now fully engrossed in a degree in Hot Glass. So I have been blowing glass instead of sitting at my torch and melting it into lovely delicate pretty beads.

But at the weekends I have been a secret squirrel making commissions for a few of my friends. Now I love my friends dearly but oh how I hate commissions! Why? Simply because you have to work to a defined end result and if you find that you can't actually produce what you first agreed upon then I feel a little awkward going back to them and saying that i'm really sorry but I just can't do it - I do always go back with an alternative that I know is manageable so all is not lost. But all the same I feel like I'm almost letting my friends down. My last "inability to produce" was due to a compatibility of glass issue (the chosen colour simply objected to being doused in bicarb of soda and then encased). But yes I find commissions slightly restrictive I guess.  Also there are the ones where you think "great I have some artistic freedom" and you think it will be easier.... but oh no don't be fooled. It is just as hard as I simply worry if they will like what I am producing to fulfill their brief.


And yes I get pinickity and fussy about the product and that is because I am having to produce to what I perceive to be their consumer expectations whereas when people buy my sets then they are buying the quality that I believe is good enough to sell. Does that make sense? Don't get me wrong - don't stop sending me commissions.... its just I find them a challenge - a good challenge, but a challenge nonetheless.

When the Frit Hits the Fan

I have been consistently buying frits for months now - just building up a little stash so that I can make lovely luscious beads with pretty colours and swirls and swathes of spots. But then I actually started using it and kept producing oodles of beads with pretty coloured spots and blobs on them and suddenly I began to wonder why I had bothered to buy all these sachets of potential wonderment when I just seem to produce the same old “frit”?

I am attracted to frit and what can be done with it - and I see other folk using it in there beads but I am floored when it comes to doing anything other than roling my bead around in it and now, courtesy of last week’s exercise, encasing it. I shouldn’t complain that much about my lack of fritty inspiration and success as I posted the pictured fritted beads on Etsy last night and they sold an hour later so there must be a market for what I produce its just that I’m not too enamoured by my efforts. I have been digging around on t’internet (Yorkshire for “the internet”) and have found some yummy pages of fritted beads mainly from america where they put a lot of silver on the base bead and they must mix their own frits as some of them are fab. I am reluctant to just use the frits as a background for other beads, such as florals, as I am convinced there is a direction for frit in its own right in my bead making. I just haven’t found it yet.

In the meantime I shall keep going with my nice pretty plain fritted encased beads and giving them pretty names until I find the magic template for my fritty exploits.

Just "Encase" You're Gettng frustrated

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