I was walking back home after dropping my children off for school and saw these beautiful flowers in one of my neighbours gardens.
Having a camera phone does have it's advantages! Anyway, my little brain started whirring and I thought "That would make a lovely floral bead!" I came home, made a cup of tea and walked up to my shed/studio/shed to see what glass I had.
As I haven't made a sucessful floral bead before I though I would keep the first one quite simple. The first thing to do is to make lots of stringer in the desired colours. So I pulled some white, blue, periwinkle, green and transparent turquoise stringers. I found some clear glass rods, green frit, put on the radio and set to work. Here is the result....
It took a long time to make but I was so pleased with the result! The last time I attempted a floral bead I just ended up with random blobs of colour all merged into one mess inside the bead. It was a hidious sight which I made worse when I tried to encase the bead. That one ended up straight in the flower bed so I can't show you how far I have come since then. I have learnt from speaking to fellow lampworkers what my mistake was and how to stop all the colours from bleeding into one another.
The trick is lots of encasing! This bead was made as follows..... I made a small barrel of clear and rolled it in green frit. Then I covered the frit with a thin layer of clear. I added my green stringer to mimic leaves and encased this in clear. Next I randomly placed tiny dots for the flower petals in sets of three. I melted them in and added transparent dots on top of the previous ones to give the petals some depth. This bit is quite tricky.... I spot heated each set of dots and plunged a pick in the center to create a tiny hole and then covered each flower with a blob of clear. This is to trap a bubble of air in the flower. The final stage was to add another layer of clear to the whole bead. Round it up in the flame and place in the kiln. Success at last!
This spurred me on to try making a set of beads with purple flowers. My original idea! Yipee! I get to use CIM Lapis AGAIN!.... I am slightly obsessed with this colour at the moment. It is such a lovely glass to work with and gives you a really deep, rich purple. I also decided to make some green cane that looked more like a leaf. This was a little more time consuming because I had to stripe black stringer onto a green glass rod, cover it in clear and then pull it into a stringer. Here is the result.....
However, as usual I want to run before I can walk. I am never satisfied unless I am stretching my abilities to their maximum. "How about adding multiple layers of flowers?" I thought to myself...... even more encasing, and heat control! A challenge .... but I did it!
If you look very closely, you can just see the little blue flowers beneath the purple ones. They look like the ghosts of flowers peeking through....
Still I feel I could stretch myself further. My mission for this week is to add stamens to my flowers. This will mean making more cane, experimenting and a bit trial and error. I look forward to posting the results soon.....
