Ever since Davide Pennso demoed blown hollow beads I've wanted to master this technique, with the added caveat of making the blown beads reliably and evenly thick enough to be as durable as my mandrel wound hollows. So I have all this $5/lb green glass that I've been practising on for the last year or so. These beads aren't horrible but I don't feel they're quite thick enough to sell (though they all did survive being dropped 4’ onto a hardwood floor, so they're not totally unreasonable.)

Bead curtain strand. Hollow beads mostly blown over the course of 2018–2019; strung 17 (or 16) Nov 2019. Approximately 5’ long plus an 18" leader; wavy tooth is boro, and made by Frances.

The other long term project has been learning to use my mandrel spinner foot pedal (those are rather lumpen smaller beads) and, though I certainly have plenty of assignments to do, I rewarded myself for finishing one of them, and making good progress on another by taking time out to thin the pileup of blown hollows on my bead-curtain trays (I have one for each color and the green one was getting unmanageable with all those huge blown beads in it.

Other beads include some spacers, some made with boro purple passion or the liked (amber beads with a wash of other colours from silver) and some flower petal beads—I really like this design, which is simple, copied from inexpensive Indian lampwork and surprisingly difficult to get even. Some day...

So I made this strand and really, I'm quite happy with it—simple and dramatic, no?

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