Last year's beadcurtain marked the appearance of ribbon cane (the twistie) elements featuring orange and green (one of my favourite colour combinations). This year I decided to make another long ribbon cane, in the main colours of orange and yellow, and used it to decorate three of the large pressed beads, as well as incorporating it into the body of one cylindrical bead (all the way to the right in the top photo—the bead is half green, half twistie, to echo the spherical bead of the same basic design.)[1]
2019 beadcurtain strand: 3’ plus 12" leader. Strung and photographed 16oct2019: glass, copper, sterling, beadalon
Because the client likes wonky actively experimental beads, I feel far more free to experiment than I would typically: and the strands thus reflect various techniques I'm actively attempting to master. This was the year the wizard finally made a foot pedal to control the speed of my mandrel spinner, and so I've been trying to get better at using this tool. Spacing dots with it is still pretty tricky, but with a little luck, I can get really nice spiral trailing, as reflected in the clear beads with orange trailing.
Another view
(I've found that both 069 yellow and especially 072 orange tend to be too dense, really, for proper light transmission, so I use various techniques to ‘thin’ the colour: shards, dots, trailing—rather than making even hollow beads from purely orange or yellow rods.
This strand thus encompasses a number of themes from prior years.
[1]Incidentally, this graduated orange-to-yellow twistie and green cylinder with the flattened orange dots turned out to be my favourite.
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
