OK - so from time to time you get a project that you just cant say no to. One of these came my way just before Christmas...
Let me introduce Missy a lovely little tricolour tortoiseshell cat. One of my lovely customers (the same lady that gave me the reptile and snake beads job), asked me if I could recreate Missy's fur in a set of beads!!
Well! I didn't know if I could make anything remotely acceptable but thought I would give it a whirl. I remembered a technique that I used for the set of garden beads (from the "How does your garden grow blog" for the 'Sunlight Through Hazel' bead pictured above) that I thought i might be able to use as a start point so I started there and played around a bit.
I had quite a few sessions at the torch trying to get colours and textures right and eventually I felt like I was getting warm. Here is a bead from the final set with Missy's picture!
The trickiest bits were to get a decent 'fur' effect within the encasement and also to get the balance of black, yellow, orange and black just right...
The added factor (which makes it quite exciting) is that orange glass looks blacky brown when it is hot so when I had the bead in a semi molten state and started to build up the texture, I can't tell fully where the orange sections end and the black sections begin. The real finished look of the bead only becomes apparent when they come out of the kiln and are cool.
Thanks to the lovely Cerry as always for giving me a great piece of work and a wonderful challenge. Many thanks for reading the blog xx