This sample strand of abstracts was (literally!) gathering dust as it hung, suspended, from the rivets holding my hood together. I didn't see it documented on the site, so I washed off the grime (& some number of days, weeks or possibly months later) photographed it.

abstract sample strand, showing an assortment of colour combos. Overall length (not including loops at each end), about 21"; largest bead, 25x23mm (approx). thompson enamels, frits, pixie dust, gold and palladium leaf. The image combines two exposures^[1] and is cropped but is otherwise untouched.

It's hard to date these beads precisely: my digital photography only goes back to about 2000, and I was definitely shooting them then. —I started making beads as early as ’96, though it took a couple of years for me to really get set up. I haven't any pix from 1996–1999, possibly because I was transitioning from film to digital using a proprietary file format that came with my first digital camera, a kodak. However, I found a number of old pix throughout 2000 that makes it clear that many of these beads date from around then: the wretched shaping, the beads with opaque bases, the use of palladium leaf (it used to be much cheaper than it is now...), the heavy black trailing.

Here's a bracelet necklace photographed 18jul2000, showing beads in a similar colourway to the turquoise frit-on-red base (inner circle, left side, 3rd & 4th from the large central bead in grey-green w purple; note the large chunks of turquoise frit, which I made myself and was quite a bit coarser than what I would eventually was able to acquire commercially. These do represent a brief experiment with white trailing, which was difficult to do finely because the white wasn't opaque enough.

At first, I saved these to have a record of what I considered to be interesting colour combos; then, as the years passed, for nostalgia's sake. —Perhaps I ought to get back into working on opaque bases; I surely have enough opaque glass that has been sitting for years because I use it so sparingly.

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