I make these beads by taking a base rod and striping it with various opaque and transparent colors, though the end effect is an generally an opaque bead. This is partially because some opaque colors effectively become transparent when thin enough, and thin-enough layers of transparent color over white still looks opaque. Excepting colorless clear, transparent (sodalime) glass is stiffer than opaque glass, with white and ivory being the softest. This leads to some interesting problems in getting the stripeys to puff in a nice even way; they're not as spherical, say, as the dotties.
And sometimes I just cheat and use all opaque colors. At any rate, I think they're fun. Like the curliQs and abstracts, they start at $12 for a bead up to 13MM hole to hole, with $14 for 14–17MM (the most common size) and $18 for larger beads—say up to 22MM or so. Bigger than that they're special order.
This year's postcard features yellow and blue stripeys, which started the series.
This batch of beads was made for the glassact251 2003 blue, white, and gold bracelet exchange. (We did red, green and white last year) Slightly different than the earlier batch of blue and yellow stripeys: I really enjoyed incorporating the acid yellow from the red/orange/yellow pattern as well as the way the darker yellow tended to strike to crayon orange.
Green, turquoise and black
red, orange and yellow (white too, but it doesn't show, being cased)
Isn't that avocado yummy? Unfortunately I have no idea whether it will continue to be available. Mike Frantz claimed at the last Gathering that it was a new color, which I understood to mean, a hand-pulled Effetre color; he certainly charged hand-pulled prices for it. I ordered some murano (vetrofond) mustard for kicks from Wale Apparatus (for $8/lb) and guess what I got...so who knows? It's mystery glass, I guess.
Tongue pink looks white on the rod, but sometimes strikes to um, tongue pink...
The above pictures give some sense of how round these beads tend to be. (Hard to say when this page was originally created, but the images date to roughly dec 03. —Possibly early 04? Updated, with howto link moved to main stripey page, 29aug06).
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
