Both of these beads—though made (probably) more than a month apart—came out of my efforts to make tigers. The bigger one was gonna be a decent size oval, but I simply hadn't recovered enough, & didn't have heat and glass enough, to make such a large bead. It cracked in the middle, dropping cold-sealed rings hither and thither. I tried stitching it back together, edged the hole whole (heh) thing back together with leaf, vine and floral trailing and called it done.

Then, of course it broke in the polisher.

Friday fuglies, May3 and Jun3. Soft glass, 2010. In its unbroken state the larger would have measured 40mm hole to hole; the smaller is 25mmx21mm. The studio notebook may not be especially useful in creating insights, but it sure helps with dating these posts. Photography 10jun10.

For the second bead I tried wodging together some black and ivory glass, figuring I could twist it into stripes as I made the bead—this being faster than making a twistie separately, then making a base ivory bead, then applying the twistie (not to mention saving glass.)

In both cases the bead failed for the same reason: the outer reaches got too cold while I was working elsewhere & unable to flash the bead to keep it warm; the unmelted in coils separated and dropped off. This is why I keep whining about wanting a phantom—even though my concentrator could not truly power such a torch it's good enough to run the outer ports with small candles, so's I can keep the "outer" parts of the bead decently warm when the inner parts are not going as smoothly (i.e. too slowly) as I would like.

In the meantime, I make fuglies.

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