June Challenge Torch Time

Hello! So my goal of writing one of these once a week didn't last long, but here I am again at least writing a new one! Better late than never.

This past weekend I got out into the studio for a good 10+ hours and created beads for a challenge that I joined on Facebook. The challenge group is called Limited Palette Challenge, and this month the colors we had to work with were all Effetre soft glass, Turquoise, Black, and White. In addition, the only tools we could use were our marver and the mandrels.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to make, had a little lack of creativity there, so just picked a stacked dot pattern that I liked and could do over and over again. I decided to stay true to the colors at first, just making a pair of beads in all the permutations of the colors. This was my list broken into two parts:

So that works out to 24 beads. I turned on an Audible book and set to work and found the making of them to be quite meditative. Here are the results.

I also decided to make some hollow beads because I love them so much. Turquoise is one of my favorites but I honestly thought with just black and white to add to it, that I was going to get bored really fast. What I didn't think about was all the possibilities when you start mixing the colors. Because Effetre Black isn't a dense black, when you thin it out or add it to a lighter color, it turns purple, so I was able to get lovely shades of purple to work with as well. I'd never really hand mixed colors much before and I hardly ever do anything without my trusty tungsten tweezers, but found that mixing colors using two mandrels as handles was actually a lot easier than other ways I've tried. Pulling stringer turned out easier that way as well, so I'll for sure continue doing that.

Here are the hollows, my favorite is the first one in the slideshow, simple colors, simple dots. I do also love the bright purple I was able to mix out of black and white that formed the base of the second hollow. I used it in some of the dots on the other hollows as well.