I'm having a bit of a black and white frenzy at the minute. I have a load of these simple, faux African style images (of my own design) lurking on my hard drive, that I figured would look really nice as beads. So I have transferred a batch of them onto some Cernit squares and have been experimenting, trying different sizes and thicknesses of beads to see what I like best,. And ultimately, I guess, what other people like best. The ones in the pic are mainly 15mm square with a couple or three 20mm ones lurking in there too. A few are hollow ones, using my go to method, Claire Maunsell's strata bead technique which she helpfully shared online and which I jumped on as it suited my impatience and my 'rustic' leanings. . .
The rest are just two pasta-machine-thick-settings thick. All are painted black on the back and sides with black alcohol ink, treated with renaissance wax and buffed up. Oh yeah, and I made a couple of artily mismatched cufflinks too.
I didn't age any of them up for a change, though the temptation is hard to resist. I'm going to make a bunch more and mess them around like the ones below. They just look so cool all antiqued and ancient relic-ified. .
And they sold. . . ;-)
The other thing I did with some more of the longer rectangular beads like the ones above, was to wrap them round some tube bead cores, and see how that came out. I decided to put them all together in one necklace, and after a bit of trial and error came up with the idea below. I need to take some better pics but I liked how the silver tone spacers worked with them. What you reckon??
Some, if not all of these will be making their way onto my Etsy shop in due course, so look out for them. I'm still considering in what form to sell them, bead sets, earring sets, made up earrings. . . hmm. . But that's food for another post I think.
See ya next time, which, despite my good intentions is likely to be another ten days away, judging by my past efforts, and hey, don't be shy about commenting, no pressure though.
Jon x
I really like these beads ... from the first picture I initially thought they were really stylish tiles! It's interesting to see that the beads start off flat like that (if I'm understanding correctly?)
ReplyDeleteThanks Stephanie,
ReplyDeleteWell, they do start off as flat 'tiles' of a kind. The image is printed, then transferred onto a thin sheet of Polyclay then baked. I then use blank squares of raw clay to build up the depth in layers. For the tube beads, I wrap the raw clay with the image on round a baked 'core' while it's still flexible, then bake the resulting bead.
these are beautifiul.
ReplyDelete