Day 6 in my beady life

Well, I thought I would try something completely different last night. Stick to one color, and try encasing a little more. I am getting a bit better at the stringer control, not the encasing so much as just figuring out how much heat it takes to melt.

Here are the beads from last night. I was planning on trying to get on the torch during the day and see if the daylight made a difference in what I made. Coming down with a cold blew that all to hell. Oh well, at least I did fire up the torch once I got dad off to bed.

I started out by making a giant cobalt blue tab, encasing that, melting it in, then squishing it, and turning it pretty rectangular. I felt like I was creating some sort of ice sculpture. The blue kept flashing through the clear as I rotated it. How fun that was to see. Then I made two little spacer beads cobalt base with clear coating . . . on the same mandrel. Maybe not such a smart move for someone who is just starting out, but it seemed to be okay. Of course when they had cooled I discovered there is a crack in one of them. The last thing i tried was a big disk with white dots around the edge. Of course by the time I got the white stringer out the bead had cooled so much it shocked and a chunk popped off when I flashed it into the flame to start reheating it. Naturally I tried to move it away from the edge of the table and burned my finger. Not badly, but it hurt for about a half hour even in ice water. No pain now, I think I killed the nerve or something. Oh well. The beads are pretty cool. The bad bead ended up off mandrel and interesting, of course it also ended up broken!!!