burnt fingers

If anyone ever asks you to do something, and you know it's a bad idea, in fact, you insist it's not good to do it now, how about tomorrow, and they give you their best whiney Cartman impression, and you're not impressed because you don't think he should get his way as often as he does, so you flat out say no...then try to do it anyway...not smart. I now have a nice mandrel shaped indentation/burn on the pads of my pointer and thumb. Yes, stupid me. But Melinda got her photo of my skewered sculptural beads and that's all that matters. And my finger pads heal fast.

I'm excited about my sculptural beads though they are somewhat grotesque. Basically they are humanoid figures sculpted around the mandrel as if they are reacting to being skewered. Going to run a black cord through the figures, not sure if each one separately or all together, and have a bead that looks like a gas nozzle on the necklace(s?) Pretty upset at the oil industry right now after seeing two ads they sponsored, basically saying "CO2 isn't bad, we breathe it out, plants 'breathe' it in, CO2 isn't pollution, it's life." Yeah, water is life also, but the excess quantity didn't seem all that appreciated in New Orleans. And those pictures of forests are sure nice, too bad there are not going to be any around in 50 years at our current rate of deforestation. Rrrr.

But back to pretty glass. I was pleased with the way the sculptures turned out...I'd tried a couple sculpted beads with moretti earlier in the week and made these disasters.

(don't mind the hole placement, I'm not sure what I was thinking except that I wasn't. And I've now learned to make sculptural beads bottom heavy so they don't hang upside down like the cat.) Borosilicate is so much easier to work and I used one of my favorite colors--silver strike (I think, it looks the same as caramel). But I got in some soft glass practice teaching my first beginning beadmaking class. I ended up with seven students since someone brought a friend along and the manager and I were too soft-hearted to turn him away. My students seemed to enjoy themselves, and everyone made a bunch of beads. My demo beads were not the most even in the world; I'm so much better at sculptural stuff than round. But hopefully it showed the students how you can fix/salvage anything. And they all made some nice round beads.