I love the discipline of make dot beads, even of just attempting to get a nice shape to my beads. Though I've been working glass for three years or so now, I still haven't really mastered the basic, or foundation skills: I don't get a perfect shape or perfect holes every time (one follows the other, pretty much); my casing invariably has air pockets in it; my dots are not perfectly spaced, sized, or shaped. And I still boil many colors with distressing regularity.
Enter frit and powder beads, which my friend and partner, Page calls abstracts. These capitalize on my strengths, two decades or more of playing with color and a tolerance for asymmetry. (What that means is that I don't mind the lumps big hunks of frit cause.) Like all artists I'm deeply indebted to those who came before me. When I started making beads I pored over and was entranced by all the images in Cindy Jenkins’ Making Glass Beads which my first teacher, Peggy Prielozny was kind enough to give me, bless her heart. But I believe these beads owe their initial spark particularly to the works of Stevie Bell, Inara Knight, and Karen Ovington depicted therein, and later to Pam Dugger. (There's no point in my pretending to be an original thinker, so I figure I may as well be up front about my sources.)
For some reason, a love of fussiness perhaps, I tend to use small quantities of a lot of slightly differing components, whether I'm stringing, embroidering, or beadmaking. In all cases, this requires considerable organizational skills to make the approach at all feasible. I'm forever attempting to come up with new and better organizational approaches for storing my media, and glass is no exception.
So, I keep the Thompson enamels in mini-muffin tins. This way I can have all colors out at once, and can easily store them in drawered cabinets when not in use out of the way of dust, cats, spiders, and so on. The same goes for the frits. Since I make my own, I have access to any color I consider compatible, which is a lot. So I mix families of colors, which keeps the numbers down to something approaching reason.
Mixing similar colors in one container is a technique I've done haphazardly for years, and was overjoyed to have legitimized by Joanne Laessig. She blends together seed bead colors for her bead embroidery, a technique she calls “stockpot”. (Oddly enough, I'd rather have my 50 or a 100 colors of seed beads each in its own little compartment, but I haven't found a storage box suitable for that. Yet.)
New! (11may02) “Bumpy abstracts”
Orange and Green
Purple, Blue and Green
Purple, pink, cream and yellow (hey, no green!)
Abstracts typically range from 13–25MM in size, and 10–25USD in price. These are just a sample; I do lots of color combinations.
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
