I owe my friend Cindy B for the colour combo, which is visually striking and, from a physics/chemistry/viscosity point of view, easy to do, and Hayley Tsang's interpretations of Heather Trimlett's 50 40 bead challenge for the basic designs. My studio notebook records my playing with this technique desultorily earlier in June, but the beads were pretty bad; this was the first lot worth anything, really.

designer sized beads in effetre, made 16 and 17 June 2025; photographed 11dec2025 sony A7c, sony 90mm macro, godox TT660 flash; cropped, lightened and scaled to 4000 pixels in gimp

The basic idea with this challenge is to use heat only (no tools), and I don't know and don't recall whether I marvered down the dots for these beads: given the lumpiness, possibly not! Because these are hollows (albeit with thick walls) melting in the dots is a real chore, so I do sometimes mash them to speed things up a bit. Note also that, like Tsang Sather, I'm using a three rather than two colour combo.^[1] I made 5,^[2] of which 4, I thought, were worth photographing. It would be nice to make some more once the weather warms up:)

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