Now, to be perfectly honest, not all of these wretched beads were made this week. Two of ’em, the cubes, that I made to try out on a friend's grinder, were made a while back. But they certainly got fuglified this week, when I tried grinding them on my grinding wheel. Despite my constant dripping water on them, they not only cracked, they shed whole chunks.

So much for that brilliant idea.

This week's crop of fridayfuglies. Well, wasn't I productive. effetre, pig, & check glass, apr09

The weird pink was from old bead release breaking; the figural bead got too cold (and probably also suffered from incompatibility); and the piece de resistance, the monkey head, was definitely a compatibility problem. Despite using only check gass, it cracked. And cracked. And is still cracking. Clearly check opaques do not, as a rule, seem to get along very well with check transparents (in this case, brown cased on brown.)

Now granted, this was supposed to be a person, but the bead decided pretty early on it wanted to be an ape, not a human, which is why the muzzle looks peculiar: I hadn't done any research, let alone assembled some references. And although the lower half of the face is wrong, still I felt did a decent job of capturing the animal without being fussy, instead emphasizing the elegant, sinuous curves which are very natural to glass.

And it just cracked six ways from crazy. Frustrating. However, I can at least say that having this goodly a collection of fuglies means I actually made a fair number of beads & tried a decent number of experiments.

Now I just have to see if all that translates into something cool down the road.

photo, file 01may09.

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