One thing I’m not too good at is figuring techniques out on my own. I pretty much stick with doing what I’ve read or been taught in classes – and that’s a lot of stuff! Sometimes I do test beads – for example I made test beads with the Val Cox frit that I got a few months ago. I have them all arranged nicely, but I haven’t gotten a chance to label them yet. I also made several test beads with CiM Pink Champagne over several base colors – they aren’t labeled yet either. I’m not too good at the test and sample thing either it seems. Oh well. But figuring stuff out on my own is something I haven’t really done a lot of.

Take this stripe bead here. I learned how to do this in Cindy Jenkins’ book Beads of Glass. This is a great book by the way. So, you make a base bead, put some dots of color on it, then wind several wraps of clear on top and melt in. this makes the first bead here – the one with the green stripes. Nice. But I’ve been looking at Kandice Seeber’s beads and she has the nicest stripe beads. (And other beads too…) I’ve been wondering how she gets such nice stripe beads. So, I was pondering this the other day and it occurred to me to melt the dots in before I put the wraps of clear on them. Now I was on to something!

I don’t have a picture of the first bead I made where I melted the dots in first – there was a smudge and I was too lazy to retake the picture. But, the next step was to try more than one color of course, so I picked out a couple of blues from my jar full of stringers. And, here we have a nice little stripe bead with two different colors of stripes. I tried it with green dots first, but the green dots spread all over the place and didn’t work well.

The final bead I tried was white dots with a transparent color – CiM Leaky Pen in this case. I was really happy with how this bead came out. My dot placement had gotten a lot better with the practice and I just love this color anyway. I also like how the white peeks out the sides a little bit. I can do all sorts of color variations with this modified technique – I don’t have to use clear to make the wraps on top of the dots, I have several lighter transparent colors. And I don’t have to use black as a base, I can use any color opaque OR transparent. There are lots of options, the important thing I discovered is to melt the dots in first, and then add the transparent encasing.