Playing with some new frit from Gaffer

I bought a little bit of Chalcedony glass from Gaffer a couple of weeks ago, and I'm still working on getting some good colors out of it. My bead group is meeting again this weekend, so I'll bring some along for us to test out. I haven't really had a chance to play with it too much yet as it's pretty hot in my studio at this time of year. Right now I'm just barely keeping up with the things I 'have' to make.
In the meantime, I've been trying out a couple of the frit samples. Frit has never been my favorite thing, but these were so interesting looking that I couldn't wait to give them a try. Here are some of the beads I've made using the lime aventurine and gold pink extra frits I received.
The lime green is a beautiful bright green with some nice sparkle- perfect for frogs, I think! The aventurine is in the back end of this one.
The gold pink extra is wonderful. It's like Moretti EDP with out all the E and D. In other words, it's all the beautiful pinky-purple color without all the problems. In this bead it's swirled with a bit of gold pink on a background of white Thompson enamel- a nice color combination, and one that's really hard to do with EDP and gold pink as they want very different flame atmospheres.

I'm going to blow some shards with some of the chalcedony and some of the other rods. My fusing buddy is pretty excited about coming over and watching me make some shards. I've got a feeling he may be a little disappointed when he sees that I couldn't blow a nice even globe if my life depended on it. At least he'll have a few samples to take home with him!

I'm going to try and get some photos of the glass group at play this weekend. Wish me luck!

Well Hello There!

Here it is, my little blog in the sky. Don't know what will end up being here yet, but I really needed a place to show off some of my newest beads. I've been making lampwork glass beads for about 8 years now, and it's gone from being a hobby to being a full time job. Winter's the down time, so I'm trying out all kinds of different bead ideas, and starting this blog. Hope you'll let me know what you like, and what you don't!

The beads you see at the top are some of my new large-holed mandalas. I love the way they turn out, but it's a bit of a bear getting the holes to be nice. And to the left- a frog, of course. I make quite a few sculptural beads- fish, frogs, masks, butterflies, hearts, pigs and cats.