Not that I tried more than once, but this is difficult to photograph, as the gold sheen doesn't really show up - in Real Life, the whole bead surface is suffused with the gold shimmer hinted at on the bottom right of the picture above. This is the work of Shannon Hill, and I tell you, I had a hard time picking just one of his beads, and very nearly picked a second. This is a great honking hollow bead about 2.5" hole-to-hole and the overall colour reads a bit rosier and less mauve than in the picture. Simple but heavily sensual.
This second picture has The Nifty Appeal: on the left is just a matching cabochon, but on the right you see a borosilicate (which means it's pretty sturdy as far as glass goes) toggle with integral cab from Chris of C. N. Y. Glass. He tells me he's been making plain glass toggles for ages, but only recently hit on the idea of making them even more decorative. His vision is that they could be worn in any position in a necklace, not just at the back. I like that!
I was excited by this, as I'd love to develop a kit and give his work a slightly wider exposure.
For me, part of the challenge of seed beading is finding creative ways to use interesting findings and focal beads, and I already have a pretty good idea where I'd like to start on this. My first thought was to combine both a cab and clasp in a project, but unfortunately that would make it a hideously expensive kit, which in general I'd prefer to avoid. I'm not [yet, hah!] Cynthia Rutledge or Laura McCabe, and so don't have the cachet or fan base to command extreme prices, even if my costs are high, so I'm looking to using the clasp only, which might actually be a better thing in that it'll force me to stretch a bit to get the effect I'd have wanted from the cab.
The good part of being interrupted by The Needs Of One's Offspring is that the camera batteries have enough time to recharge, so even though at the top of this posting you're led to believe that you won't see more than those two pictures, in fact the truth is a little different.
Really, very conservative buying for a seed-beader. I rushed through at lunchtime the first day, found a couple of colours I'd been looking for and filled in to make it a worthwhile purchase, fully intending to do some serious shopping later, but I lost interest. Or something.
These pearls are BIG, close to a full centimeter in length, I think. Yummy. I'm weak for pearls anyway, but when I can persuade myself that I actually need them, and more than one strand of each because I'll make KITS, then you should know that this is pretty restrained.
Now I guess these are pretty interesting. I'm guessing that the huge things are dyed crazy lace agate (crummy crazy lace agate since the lace effect is kinda meh) though I suppose it's in the realms of the possible that they came out of the ground (after cutting and polishing) with those colours. I don't actually care as I like them anyway.
The stripey things are probably agates, probably dyed, then definitely etched. I actually saw quite a few stones etched, the most interesting of which were those agates that they shock so that they crackle. Polished, they have a slight translucency, giving them a hint of the ethereal, but etching does away with that, rendering them rather earthy and mysterious.
The round beads are simply large faceted amethysts. I suppose they're dyed, as they were too inexpensive to be naturally so dark. Once again, the snob in me lies dormant. It asserts itself in the presence of unnaturally coloured topaz though, for some reason. What can I say, I'm a mass of contradictions, a fabulous amalgam of human frailty bound into an incredible - oh gag me with a spoon.
Tomorrow I start the new job.
I doubt I'll keep up here quite as much. In any event there's unlikely to be quite as much progress on anything once all those idle hours are given over.
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