Creative Slump II: Side Trip down New Glass Lane

Saturday was the first meeting of the Southern Flames lampworking group that I have been able to attend for a while. Meetings are most often on Wednesday nights, and very often I am teaching on Wednesday evenings.

It was a fun meeting. During the meeting, we had a new visitor--Brad Shute of Striking Color. He brought samples of his new silver glass, and offered his odds and short ends at a very reduced price. They looked lovely! I decided to try it, but, as I have had mixed success with the silver glasses, I thought I would invest in only a quarter pound.

After the meeting, Marcy Lamberson (StudioMarcy) and I were the only two who took him up on his offer. We walked out into the chilly night, over to the back of Brad's truck. He pulled out a scale, and three cardboard boxes full of short ends. We began making silly jokes about getting our glass "Crack," complete with parking-lot dealers and careful scales. I should say that

Brad was very generous in his reading of quarter pounds and pounds -- he gave me more like half a pound of glass. Marcy bought a pound, and her total was likewise a good bit over her specified amount. We all shook hands, made more jokes about midnight goods handovers, and headed out to our respective ways. I went to the last part of the Open Studio night at Duckbill Studios, and Marcy went home.

Well, I got to try the glass on Sunday, which distracted me from Gwacie's assignments. I have had hit-or-miss results with many silver glasses, and in general find that *for me* they aren't worth the price. I do well with Taxco and Rocio Silver Mist, but the new Terra and other glasses just never work as well for me as they do for many others--it's purely my technique. So I approached Brad's glass with a combination of determination and trepidation! I didn't have much torch time, but I made a wanna-be barrel and some sprees.

The barrel, alas, broke through the bead release before I finished shaping it, and appears to be permanently fused to the mandrel. This is the one bad thing about middle-dipped mandrels, IMHO; one's occasional plant stakes are much shorter. But the silver glass produced absolutely beautiful colors with almost no fuss.
The glass does not like to be encased, I found, at least not with Diamond Clear. It's technically COE 104, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is compatible with all 104 glasses. You can see the cracks in the spree beads, feh and double feh. So: no or only very light encasing, where the ratio of clear to base is smaller. The barrel is encased, too, but there were no cracks because the clear was less of a percentage of the whole bead.

So that took up my torching time on Sunday, and is bringing back some of my enthusiasm. Brad's glass gets a solid thumbs-up sign from me, as well. I am teaching Monday and Tuesday, and Wednesday I want to go vote (IF YOU CAN, GO VOTE EARLY. THIS IS AN HISTORIC ELECTION NO MATTER WHO YOU BACK--PLEASE PARTICIPATE!). Friday, though ... time to work on assignments and custom orders, and maybe some more of Brad's silver glass.

When I'm Feeling Uninspired ...

Well, before I explain, a good thing happened. My friend Melanie Gulley owns a new bead store in Avondale Estates, just east of Decatur, GA. It's really one of the only bead stores this far east now that the Stone Mountain store has closed, and so it is exciting to see! She's done a great job with it.

Thursday I dropped by with the cigar boxes in which I keep my beads, and she picked out a lot of beads to carry in her shop. I mean a LOT! My Etsy store went from 96 items to 68 in less than an hour, and she also took several items that weren't listed on Etsy. Now let's hope people buy them! Whether they do or not, it's such a rush having someone like my stuff enough to want to use up some of her shelf space on it. Of course, that AND having people buy them is even better, for both of us. She also wants me to teach some beginning lampwork classes if we can get the space and insurance regulations straightened out. Diane Kovach of DKDesigns, our local Southern Flames co-president, is really excited and is offering a lot of help. (I had asked her to make sure that I wouldn't be cutting into her livelihood, because I have a full time job and she doesn't. But she doesn't really teach in this quarter of the city, so that's good for me!)

What that means, though, is that I suddenly went from having enough inventory to keep the Etsy shop going and to prepare for the three day Down The Street Bead Show in September to having not nearly enough inventory. I know that I can always pull items for the show if they haven't sold, but ... so I was in the enviable position of both having a whole day to torch and the need to crank out a lot of sets.

And, wouldn't you know it, I went brain dead. Even the one custom set I am making to order this week turned out poorly; not one blessed thing from the kiln came out right. So, to quote Lisa Kudrow, I "let it go, let it go!" and started fresh today.
Am taking a break--the kiln's almost full, and we're having a monster thunderstorm, which we needed. I just hope the rain continues in a more gentle way, because this was a true gullywasher, and that will run off rather than filling lakes and aquifers.

But I digress. My online friend Kandice Seeber has a wonderful blog, "Coloraddiction." Every so often she writes about a basic color in one of the main soft glass palettes, and shows how it changes when combined with other colors. Some color combinations I knew about, but others I had had no clue.

So when I am uninspired, I turn to Kandice's latest entry and try that color combo to see what I like. Throughout this post I've pictured some of the beads I've made with her most recent "tried but true" color, light turquoise. To jump start me today I tried frit blends, and will post those tomorrow!