11... Messy Business

Cleaning beads is a dirty job, but someone has to do it. I know I said you would be seeing cool jewelry pics, but that will have to wait. Remember the pattern? Torch in the morning, jewelry in the afternoon, torch at night. Well, since I didn't do that on Sunday, there were no afternoon beads to make things with. But boy are there beads to work with today.

You'll have to excuse my messy dish cloth. We are pulling back the curtain here people... it involves messy dish rags, you are just going to have to accept that. I used to clean beads on to a paper towel, but I am trying to be more environmentally aware. So no more paper towel wasting... it is dish rags. Every morning when beads come out of the kiln, they are soaked in a tea cup of water to loosen the bead release inside them, then they holes are reamed out with Dremel tool fitted with a diamond bit file. Those Dremel's spin at such high speeds, lol... I am covered in a speckling of bead release splatter every time!!

You can see I was inspired to do some tone on tone contrasting stuff. All the blue beads were the "morning" beads and the reds/orange ones were the "night" beads. Really should have been the other way around, huh? The idea came to me while torching at JOOLZ on Friday. I made a plaid bead with turquoise and cobalt... I knew I had to make more. Then I decided I might as well work through the whole rainbow. So it'll be more red/orange this morning (a tantrum cut last night's session short... Andrew had a tantrum, not me, lol) and then lime on dark green... maybe from black/white.... oh how about mixing them all up after that?!?

Click the pic and you can read what I plan to make with the beads!