Red is not my favorite color (and probably hasn't been since kindergarten) but nevertheless a good pure clear red—particularly if it's leaning closer to blue than yellow—is a dramatic and beautiful thing indeed.
Unfortunately, this ain't it. The slightly cracked rotation of axis ornament that serves as the bottom pendant is nice enough, but the wodgy boro near it, not to mention the scum blackened wing, are hideous. The beads are an unfelicitious mess of matte translucents and dark transparents, and the photo emphasizes all the ways golden red boro doesn't blend with soft-glass screaming transparent orange, quite apart from rendering (non-backlit) red beads a dull, unpleasant brownish black.
red bead curtain strand. 2006.
I also have a great many failed dotties—the rotten things blow out when I'm trying to melt the dots in. I also sometimes get frustrated, and happened to be working with red glass the day I decided to fiddle around making openwork beads. So there are a lot more lampwork beads in my current strands, and many fewer of the roughly-same-size indian glass beads I used to fill out my earliest efforts.
Another difference is that, excepting the two boros and a bit of orange to get the length, this thing is basically monochromatic, instead of a mixture of warm colors. But the real question is, why this hideousity at all? Ah, well, because once on the wall, it blends with the other strands, and the big beads provide visual contrast and interest: that is, it doesn't really matter how bad it is, once it's above some minimum standard, because as a whole the thing works.
In other words, you too can string bead curtains.
The entire series:
file created 09jul06; series links added 04aug06
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
