This beautiful bead has been sitting in my basement for awhile. Our guild has an exchange at our annual winter holiday party, which is how I imagine I acquired this bead (because it came in a very spiffy box, which I failed to photograph, unfortunately.)

cylindrical barrel bead, 15x42.5mm. exact date unknown, probably late 2000s. Artist would be either Rita Stucke, or possibly another guild member inspired by her shards series.^[1]

One of the fascinating things about this bead is that I don't really know exactly how it was made. Oh, I don't mean that I'm unaware of the fact that it's a fairly basic barrel of black effetre (or similar 104 compatible) decorated with shards; but rather, I'm not really clear how the spider webbing was achieved.

Close inspection reveals that silver plum is almost certainly involved (and btw, courtesy of, um, JC Herrell silver plum makes a nice dense, dark, stiff ultra-fine stringer). It wouldn't surprise me if the artist used anice, rather than standard, white, since I gather just such weird effects are why most people bother with anice. —If I had to guess how this was done, I'd say Rita encased her bubble of white (or ivory) with silver plum, then blew it thin. Might be fun to try, tho’:)

another view of the same bead. Shot 6jan2012, olympus e620, zuiko 50mm macro.

Once upon a time Jim Smirchich used to get an interesting web effect using opalinos and/or alabastros; and this looks closer to that than the more common intense black stringer ‘lace’ effect.

In any event, it obviously comes out of the fluid dynamics of molten glass, and makes for a wonderful pattern.

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