After using up all of those badly made pressed Indian beads (that I hadn't squirreled away for safekeeping or other projects or otherwise mislaid) I started making bead curtain strands out of bad glass beads and other miscellaneous pressed stuff, mostly czech. Last summer, having a bunch of new strands made in the old way, I decided to take the whole thing down, wash all the grime and dust off and rearrange. You'll note I've flipped the color shift. This is for two reasons: one, if I do the window to the left of this one, I want the cool colors in the center, to dominate. Because red is my least favorite color (since the studio is green and purple; I love the red floral wallpaper in my dining room) I've placed it furthest out of my visual range when sitting at the torch.
But then it smacks me first thing every time I go in the room, since this window and the entrance make up the southwest corner of the room. C'est la vie. All the bad beads do serve as sort of a record of my working methods, and I often illustrate a point to guests by pointing to this or that bead on the curtain. Hm. Perhaps I ought to put my best beads in the other curtain, should I ever get around to making it...
Bead curtain. Roughly 20 new strands added for a total of 61 currently displayed (one is broken, awaiting repair); washed, rehung. 2006. Weight's presumeably up to 30#, since I've added a third again strands.
I tried to edit out the background by placing a sheet behind the curtain. Didn't work real well. I concluded I needed to hang the sheet on the other side of the window, but there's not really a convenient way to do this, owing to that window overhanging a basement stairwell, which in turn makes setting up a ladder tricky.
Beadcurtain in the new studio, without background. Shot in early 2007.
This photo has all sorts of distracting background material; the bottom half was significantly darker, so I gimped, or rather I watched the wizard gimp, two exposures together to get this image. These things are just plain difficult to photograph!
slanting shot of the curtain. I think it's kind of cool.
My efforts to do closeups failed utterly, but if you look closely you can see I've made a few fused beads: the blue ones are from a bottle, and the colorless ones are sheet glass with some compatible dichro my friend Margaret kindly gave me. I'm sorry to say I've not much continued my fusing experiments.
return to main beadcurtain page; or to original bead curtain page; post started 23mar; completed 27mar
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
