So I think I've mentioned a time or two that the innovation I really like about my friend Joy Cichewicz's tiger heads is that she cases the base ivory with transparent ambers—this is, of course, the traditional way to make tiger beads—you know, those cute round ivory and black twistie wrapped beads cased in root beer—and to be sure the horse lady (Kathy Johnson) makes her horse-head beads this way (with cased transparents), but still, I'd never seen it with cat heads, and I thought it was really cool.

So what trying to get the translucency of human skin? (which after all is not really opaque—that's why you can see people blushing: you're literally seeing their blood vessels get fatter:) So I made this hideously ugly head (because the bead collapsed, among other things) to test the look:

Not only is the bead horridly awful, it also cracked. Effetre is pretty self-compatible, but there are some things you can't do—case opaque reds in clear, ferex. I wondered if this was a problem here. (I'm thinking pink is perhaps erbium pink—certainly the analogous color in the BE line is, and I wondered if the colorant rendered the glass less-compatible.) So I made a little test bead, as you see, and waited for it to crack.

After a week or so of no cracks, I concluded I'd just been sloppy about pre-warming the head and it was operator error, rather than a technical issue. So I made the two heads below, after taking my toso class, which among other things, reminded me to slow down and work cold. I was particularly pleased with the one on the left. It's probably the best head I've done. By dint of acid etching the pink, I thought I'd get a nice translucent effect.

(This was also when I made the shamrock samples I put up on etsy;) Of course, after I made these two beads, I discovered my sample seed bead had cracked! Arrgh! Obviously, the incompatibility is fairly slight. —So far, my heads haven't cracked. And they may not. I did a whole series of check glass florals of dark trans aqua (capri) cased over mint green, and all but one cracked—it remains, for whatever reason—the way I cased it, mashed it, something—just fine, well over a year later.

But my rotten casing skills illustrate another problem with this approach, which is the lines that come out of my uneven application of the transparent. One way to get around this would be to lollipop the clear and use that thin sheet to case the base, but it still doesn't solve the problem of compatibility—or, for that matter, what to do with the nose—I've been making that out of transparent, but really it should be cased opaque too, which would look weird, I think, atop of a trans. So for the moment, I've gone back to rolling the base glass in thompson enamels, which gives some variation, and thus, more realistic skin tones.

But I'm still thinking about this problem.

beads, 24? jan, 11feb; photos, 12feb; post 13feb10.

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

Sylvus Tarn