So I received a request to copy the focal in this pendant:
Bullseye glass, pixie dust; 2008. Note the brilliant use of dark slate blue rhinestone rondel contrasted with the pale green swaroski—colours I never would thought to set off this mostly-yellow bead.[1]
I could tell, from the dull-grey blue of the outer petals of the flowers, that the bead was made from bullseye, because that weird, semi-opaque blue[2] wouldn't’ve been available in effetre (104) back when I made it.[3] Besides, I had a surprisingly vivid memory of trying to use up bullseye strip[4] in acid yellow, and since there is no Thompson enamel line compatible with Bullseye, I would've had to use some other background, such as pixie dust.
Both these factors pointed to bullseye, though effetre also comes in this acid 069 colour.
I didn't start using photo organizational software until sometime in the 2010s, and it finally occurred to me, while I was doing research for this series, that I could dredge up the old .txt file I used in the past to record my photos, which is how I found the image below. Interestingly enough, it had been imported into the site, but never used, meaning that I had intended to make a page, but never got very far.
20080306 nikon 8400, f/7.6, ev 0, 1/4s, ISO 50, photoflood lighting. Cropped in gimp. As you can see, the yellow bead is much more nicely shaped than the others:)
And so there it is, documentation, or what art museum curators like to call provenance, for this object. Why this matters to me will, I hope, become clear as the series progresses.
[1]And my partner has the audacity to claim she's got no colour sense!!!
[2]Note the stock number—108—means it's one of their oldest colours.
[3]I'm not certain but what even now there's nothing in quite that hue, though CiM makes a lot of very nice semi-opaques/greasy glass in this style.
[4]Because I'm all about using weird stuff, such as the strips Bullseye initially marketed to lampworkers before transitioning to the much more favoured rods—strips are sharp and difficult to rotate. So in other words I was motivated to use this stuff up, now that the much nicer rods were available—absolutely no, no, no reason to “save” it (using up & saving ‘the good stuff’ are constantly in tension for me): enough that, when I saw the bead fifteen years later, I still had a memory, or at least was pretty easily able to recreate that memory, of ‘oh, I know why I made this bead: to use up that bullseye strip. In a colour I'm not altogether fond of anyway.’
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
