Torch Time Again!

 Good golly, I have not been blogging much! Just popping in now to say my torch is back up and running after being on hiatus for a couple of months. I've started out with some fancy silver-cored fish pendants and glass whorls for spinning yarn.
New curved beads are on the to-do right now list! We'll see how that goes~ they are always a bit of a challenge.

Lampwork Glass Fish Beads and Other Glass Sculpture to Wear!

See Spot

Well, I have little, if anything new to say about lampwork glass fish, except I make them. A lot of them! Sea life is always a fun theme. Most of my fish styles only exist in my lampwork world. They often come together as I work on them, though I have an idea about colors and design before I begin. As I go, I pay attention to how the design is developing and decide what seems to be working (or not!). There is a gallery that contains some previous designs on flickr, and always loads of fish pendants available in my etsy shop, of course!

Pink Adobe Turtle

I also make turtles, seahorses, a random sea urchin, some shells now and again and even mermaids when things lead me in that direction. Turtles are always interesting- folks ask for odd colors and then I want to check and see if there are any actual turtles in similar colors. What a surprise! There really are pink turtles. Not quite like these, but still... Oh, and frogs, but perhaps I should have a special post about those guys.



There is this cool book called 'Art Forms in Nature' published by Dover books that is simply filled with interesting designs to influence my glass work! any of those creatures are from the ocean realm. But sometimes I just have to pull them onto shore! Some these beads go distinctly into the fantasy realm, like these mannikin beads. I call them that because, well, they remind me of little sentries, or maybe chess men!

Glass Fish Inspirations

Lampwork glass fish are one of my favorite kinds of beads to make. They are a lot of fun to wear all by themselves as pendants. Most folks who purchase them use them in this way, so I bail them and put them on cords before I ship them out.
I find you can do almost anything with a fish body and it looks pretty nice. Last week, I decided to try making a couple of more realistic fish. The first thing I did was to search the internet for photos of fish that looked interesting to me. I was looking for bright colors, colors I might not normally think to mix together in a bead, and interesting patterns. One of the fish that interested me was a clown trigger fish. I changed up the color just a little bit- adding a little more green than was strictly called for, and came up with a sweet little fish that was quite different from others I'd made. I used Thompson glass enamels for some of the color- I like the way it works when I want to imitate a natural pattern.
The next challenge I set myself was to use up some of the glass twistie scraps I had lying around. This one is purely a fantasy fish, with a base of white and silver and a lot of pastel colors that meshed nicely.
The last fish I'll be showing today is what I'm calling a sari (or saree) fish. It is an idea I'm still working out, where one pattern is pulled across a different base pattern, just as a sari is draped around a body. This red one is my favorite in that design.