Continuing to dig through the archives here: this stub is so old I made it before creating the FridayFugly subdirectory (which is why the background is a tasteful grey purple, instead of the screaming turquoise, which is s'posed to be painful:)

Anyway. The bead on the left is a holepop, which I've always maintained has great potential for stringing. The one on the right is admittedly a hot mess, but clever beadworkers have found a way even to enjoy those (i.e. Joella's ‘tantrum’ beads, but alas, my google-fu is not turning up many good examples).

round, 16mm hole to hole. vessel 21 x 52 mm.

But to me, beads like this have another use, one that I've touched on before, but, now that I have students sometimes frustrated with their failures, bears repeating: if the bead is already a failure, then you may as well play with it, cuz it's not as if it can get any worse, and you might discover some fun little property of glass that you can then incorporate into a good bead.

This is what Jennifer Geldard means when she says ‘Only your failures are your own’: they are your opportunity to go off into unexplored country, with no real costs save a bit of your time. (Granted, you need to balance the desire to explore with the sweat of refining your new concepts, but it's my experience that while kids may lack the discipline for the latter, most adult artists need to play more, not less.)

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