I currently have one retail outlet for my lampwork: Stony Creek Beads. The owner carries them “because [she] loves them”, a response akin to catnip for any artist. However, they're focals, and therefore expensive, so it helps to have a sample piece illustrating how they could be used.

Necklace, 2017. Features a 1.5” lentil and ‘beach glass’ accents. Photography: lensbaby pro on an oly 620; image cropped, with some cloning of background along bottom edge.

I specifically designed this piece to be something a customer could easily put together from components carried by the shop. This is not so much to incorporate that ‘cross-marketing’ so beloved of corporations, but as a courtesy for the customer, who can immediately put something together without having to hunt a bunch of obsolete components that have been out of stock for a decade or more (why yes, I do have beads I purchased over a quarter century ago, never mind weird odd vintage stuff I've collected over the years...)

It's for this reason I didn't really worry whether the bottom doodad—an 8 or 10mm 5301 sarovski crystal, for the anal amongst you—was in focus: any sort of bead roughly that size will do, and it can be adjusted for customer taste. (In fact, all the beads can: that's the point, to give a suggested framework.)

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