Though I certainly could've shipped the earrings featured the past two days, as it happened, a cousin of the recipients was attending the funeral, so I entrusted her to hand-carry them; while I was at it, since my instructions for choosing sizes and colours were ‘you're the artist, whatever you think best’, I requested the niece to help choose beads to match her aunt's necklace for her cousins—I thought that extra emotional component would be nice:)

And then it occurred to me, perhaps a niece might also like earrings as a memento of her aunt? She especially liked the mostly transparent (clear colourless glass base) bead with only frit and no thompson enamel on the aunt's necklace; frustratingly, the bead she liked best from the remaining sample strand couldn't be matched well to any others (besides, IIRC, having a holepop).

As it happens...I had a double hollow pendant that was rather similar to that mostly-transparent frit bead, which I hadn't worn in years. Perhaps it was time to give it a new home, then?^[1] We could, um, make beads for earrings to go with, if she liked.

She liked, but wouldn't that be a lot of trouble? I replied that the biggest issue is that she would have to wait around while I made beads, which could be boring. She was okay with that.

Actually she had to wait around while I:

1. removed the silver leaf that had welded itself over the course of months (or, let's be honest here, probably years) to my leaf sucker, not to mention the ring of heavy rust that had formed under the plastic container I'd put on top of it to keep the leaf from escaping
2. cut up some gold leaf (while complaining how much the price of gold and especially palladium has increased since I started lampworking not quite three decades ago)
3. finally made the beads^[2]
4. then used up the rest of the gold leaf so I wouldn't have a repeat of it sticking/rusting to the leaf sucker.

As these earrings were to match both the pendant I'd given her and co-ordinate with the aunt's necklace, (not to mention I had the recipient right there to provide feedback) I could adjust the design a bit, most particularly by added extra gungroo (bells) so the earrings would make a little chiming sound, but also by adding some extra findings that improved the movement at the sacrifice of copying the necklace exactly.

So, finally, I have featured some new beads on this website!^[3]

Bonus, they photographed a bit better lying down—my friend was willing to watch me make beads, but drew the line at another round of photographic futzing to try doing hanging versions of the images.^[4]

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

Sylvus Tarn