This strand doesn't have a lot going for it, excepting perhaps that it includes my Joy Munshower class exercise of a manatee. After starting us out on walking twists (something I always attempted to avoid doing) and a nice, easy jellyfish, an animal so gelatinous that it really, from an artistic point of view, qualifies as a plant, she had us do manatees. Sure, they're mammals, but again, so shapeless that for the most part, (i.e. everything but the eyes, muzzle and nose) they were pretty easy. Most of us made quite acceptable, if not perfect ones, right out of the gate. I whomped out two of them, one of which made it into this beadcurtain strand.

bead curtain strand, roughly 18" long. Beadalon and sodalime glass beads, 2015.

Munshower likes playing with ‘fancy’ opaque rods to get her backgrounds, and her current method for making sea-themed backgrounds is to case 591227 Effetre Caribbean Sea^[1] with whatever blue and green transparent shorts she has lying around in a rather idiosyncratic manner;^[2] I used this technique to make the base bead for the manatee. We used another fancy rod to make the sea lettuce^[3] which you make ahead of time & then insert into the sculpture, a technique istr Loren Stump teaching way back in the day, and which has propagated through the community.

The bird is a more recent reprise of my parrot series (excepting with uglier color) but it does match the rest of the color scheme, and the brown helps to link it to those strands. This piece also includes another Yoko Ono key, and its transparency necessitated working some transparent grey hollows so it wouldn't look horribly out of place. Not sure I made a really convincing case, here...

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.