I love making glass beads more than anything else I've ever done before (well, almost anything). I enjoy working with the colors and textures, the concentration involved and, yes, the thrill of "playing with fire"! Even the most complicated beads don't take very long to create, so on top of everything else, it's instant gratification. Certainly faster than knitting a sweater.

I've been making beads for five years. I'm definitely NOT a native talent, but I love the glass so much, I'm willing to stick with it and keep on trying (not my usual reaction to tough stuff). I used to be a perfectionist, but working with glass has taught me to relax and go with the flow. AND that sometimes mistakes really aren't.

One of the first things I got a handle on was eye beads:

They are fun, but get a little boring after a while...
So, along came variations on dots:

I really went dotty with this ladybug.

After a lot of diversions and experiments, the next thing I really had fun with was spirals and feathering. In a spiral, you wrap a thin "strand" of glass (a stringer) around the base bead. Nice, but not real exciting by itself. However, if you then pull the warm strands of glass across the base with a metal pick, you can get all sorts of interesting effects.

And finally, with my favorite beads, I've made a twisted, two-color stringer, spiraled it with goldstone, and done the feathering. More is always better!

Um, the center one ran kind of amok. but as usual, I tried to turn this to my advantage. Now I do swirly beads, too. These are all encased in clear, which magnifies the underlying design. The first one is a basic feather, the second one uses "tailings" of various twists for a watercolor effect, and the third is a rather chaotic variation. (Okay, it was a mistake, and I got mad at it. <G>)

Encasing (covering a bead in clear glass), has been one of the most difficult things for me to learn. I think I'm finally getting thehang of it, though.

Here are some variations on encasing, with some other effects, as well. The first one is a bead I made for Christmas, using gold leaf and slices of Italian millefiore (thousand flowers) canes. The second is another exercise in being cheap, er um, frugality. It uses the tailing of a 2-color twist, feathered then cased. It reminds me of water and ocean waves. The third one uses a spiral of blue ribbons, lightly cased, then dotted with transparent dark blue, and a trace of goldstone stringer.

More experiments with inside and outside texture. Kind of a lot of work, with all the preparation and layers, but fun, too. The outside ones are opposites, with a black or white base, opposite-colored fragments of latticino (cased twisted stringers), heavily cased and carved with a twist while hot. The center bead has a clear base, wrapped in crinkly palladium leaf, decorated wth millefiore, encased, and decorated with squiggles of red stringer.

I finally got brave enough to try encased flowers, which I've always admired from other artists. 

These are each slightly different, but all have a dichroic glass base.

I've realized in laying out this page that almost everything is a bicone shape. Horrors!  

One of the new shapes I've begun to master is teardrops.

Beadmaking has given "heavy metal" a whole new meaning for me. There are lovely applications for gold leaf (also in the red teardrop above), palladium, and silver leaf and foil. The cool thing about palladium is the way it changes color in the flame (that is not a reflection).

Okay, you've been very kind to keep reading and make it this far (yes, this is almost the end). As a thank you for your determination, I present one of my favorite bead sets...with a little story. I took my daughter out for Mexican food at a popular chain. I knew I had to make beads when I came home, but I like their margaritas (lots of salt on the rim), so I figured "just one" couldn't hurt. Well, I came home and worked on an idea for jack o'lanterns. The next day, when they cooled, I stared in amazement at their little faces...they were nothing like I thought they would be, totally goofy. In honor of my incapacity, I named them "drunken punkins", and the were one of my best-sellers on Ebay that fall. So, here they are!

Thanks for looking!!!

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Updated 2/4/03