All articles filed in Lampworking

Yes, there is such a thing as an ugly bead. I should know because I have made so many of them.  The ones you see below are glass rejects that I have accumulated over the years.  They suffer from such defects as garish colors, drippy dots, pointy ends and general whopperjawdidity.

I had a sack of ugly beads that I had saved over the years.  At first I thought I would give them away.  But why should I give away crappy beads?  Then I thought I would toss them.  “No,” I decided, I’ll put them in the recycling bin.  “No, I’ll sprinkle them in flower beds in the neighborhood.” No, that didn’t feel right either.  And then I decided to pull out the kiln and see if I  could make them into something beautiful.  And Viola!  All the glass cabochons in the picture below are made from the ugly beads you see in the pictures above along with a little dichroic, Moretti rod chips, stringers and some flat clear Moretti.

I put the beads in the kiln a few at a time and melted them (after cleaning out all the holes thoroughly) I broke up some beads and rearranged the pieces.  Some beads I stacked on top of other beads and put a stringer of a contrasting color glass  down the middle. 

Orange bead stacked on a blue bead with aqua stringer.  Spacey!

If I only liked part of the fused cabochon,  I cut it off and combined it with something else I liked. 

I added dichroic class for interest to some of the cabs.  I didn’t want to use too much.  I think that fused glass cabs fill of dichroic glass are boring.  The cab above is a disk bead with dots around it stuffed with goldstone stringer and topped with a layer of clear. Later I fused it to another partial cab that I liked.

Sometimes I liked the bottom of the cab more than the top.  So I just cleaned off all the shelf primer,  turned it over and fused it again.

This one is a clunky star bead that I fired with a layer of clear over it.  I considered trimming off the places where the color did not flow and firing it again, but I like the contrast between the clear and the color. I like the bubbles too. The white dot in the middle is where the hole in the bead was originally. 

I plan to post some more specific directions and before/after pictures.  By the way, the glass is Moretti and the kiln is a Jen-Ken Bead Annealer hooked up to a Kiln Controller.