Score!

I enjoyed working with Peri's lampwork rings so much last time that I went a little crazy at the Bead Society meeting yesterday.

Rings in four colours (that semi-opalescent orange is to die for) and juicy round beads with raku frit.

Yum yum yum.

This sample for the next batch of classes has been taking forever (right angle weave isn't fast, but somehow I like it. Weird) but I'm really pleased with the way it's turning out.

The seed beads are fabulous up close, with striations and washes of rainbow colour on deep sludgy navy which from here looks merely dingy. (The green tint is probably due to the deep olive thread I used. With right angle weave the thread definitely shows, and so you can alter the overall colour of the piece with the thread - I'd still use something in the same vicinity, but you can nudge it around the colour wheel). Still, there's something to be said about an item which is pleasurable in different ways from a number of different perspectives.

And then a sample for Tuesday's class. I'd made a single sample (currently in the case at the bead store) and written no notes and taken no step-by-step pictures which is often dangerous, as not all seed beads are the same size and proportion, and it can happen that when you try to repeat a configuration, it just doesn't work quite the same way.

Additionally, different colours can alter the look, moving it from "Cool!" to "Uh, really?"

Colour and comfort zones and the way we interact and react and work with and in them are fascinating.

I'm generally drawn to deep, sludgy, murky colours, but am simply weak for semi-translucent and opalescent shades, so these lovely soft pink rondelles found in me an easy mark.

If they'd been any kind of brown or green or burgundy or grey, I'd have been done in an instant, but because they're not what I often work with (and when I do, I'm rarely satisfied with the palette), I had the hardest time.

My first (and usual) instinct was monochromatic, but with varying intensities, so colours ranged from deep, gunmetal purple all the way through to pink. Let me tell you, it doesn't look nearly as bad in the picture (on the lower left) as it made me feel just before I cut it up last night.

Then I tried for some seed beads in a matching shade (also opalescent. I have tons of them. I cut up just about everything I ever start with them. The universe is telling me something) and accents of bronze. That was even more nauseating.

I'm not sure what it is with me and photography. Gorgeous in the flesh (uh, glass) translates to blah on the screen, and lunch-losing in the flesh is merely meh when I show you. Everything seems to migrate to an indifferent common denominator.

In the end (going with silver, grey and black accents), I changed a fair amount in the way it's constructed, and have included a bunch of suggestions and variations with the instructions, so I am not dissatisfied.

Except that tomorrow it will no longer be the weekend, with which I AM NOT YET DONE. That's always so very disappointing.