This is by far my favorite Treasury that I have put together. It was just one of those things that everything fell together perfectly as I was looking for the items to include. I'm part of the Etsy Treasury Team and I only had two items that weren't part of the team. And, even those two fit right in as if they belonged right from the beginning. Amazing! Oh, and click on it and you will see a much larger version of it.
I've been bugging Pam of ferrarioriginalbeads for a picture of her designs. When she sent me the picture, the first thing that struck me was that I felt that I could reach right through the monitor and pick up the bracelet. Excellent photography! This bracelet also looks yummy enough to eat! She has used a combination of her lampwork beads and Mykonos Ceramic beads with copper components. Great combination!
Sharon of Seedlings Jewelry tweeted me about her lovely finished earings that she had posted to her flickr account. I was really curious to see what she had done with these organic, earthy looking washers from Mykonos Greece. I personally love the green patina of these Copper washers and when I look at the beads I wonder how they are going to be used. I never would have thought this design up! So original!
These are the earings that she made with the beads and I love the copper elements used with these beads. They work so well off of each other. I often look at my beads and wonder, what will these beads become?
Again, I am just in total wonderment of the gorgeous creations that my buyers have come up with. From beaded creations to sparkly bracelets and earings, I never know what will be made next.
Here is the same glass integrated within a focal with two other glasses. It is the lighter blue on the bottom. I wasn't sure what I was going to get when I made this focal, but I thought I might get more of the ethereal look I got in the disk beads. I think that because it was mixed in with all of the other glasses it reacts differently, but still has a striated look to the glass. Then there is the last bead set!
Vicki Murphie of Sasha321 took my simple Tomato Bisque crystals and turned them into these beautiful earings! She wrote to me and told me that she used Higher Chakra Supply earing wires which are those twirls of metal you see above the bead. I'm very impressed with how these components all work so well together.
Priscilla of PGsGemspiration took some of my blue marble beads and turned them into this wonderful creation. She calls them Blueberry, which is fitting! I have to reiterate again that I have the most wonderfule buyers! They keep me thinking out of the box and challenging me to come up with something unique that they can use in their designs. Even the simple bead is turned into something gorgeous in their designs! And, I thank them wholeheartedly for their continued support and friendship!
This bead is one of the larger focals that I have tried out various cuts just to see which way things would go. Interesting effect. I love the contrast between the silver and the blue. The hard part is taking the photograph of these lovelies! That's why when I list items for sale I take lots of pictures so that you can see them at different angles. All of these silver glasses can be tricky to capture the beauty of it sometimes.
I really prefer more of a freeform look to beads, odd shapes and interesting cuts in the glass. At least I think they are interesting. When you cut glass it can spring apart like these two beads did. I've been working on perfecting the actual number of cuts and the proportion of the base glass to the special glass - high silver content, and then seeing how the base glass influences the outcome. The blue in the left on really does influence the color of the bead. These silver glasses are partly transparent so you see the color as you turn the bead. On the right it is a pale pink base which I think adds more color to the iridescence. I felt that if I used a pale yellow it would be too yellow. Really interesting.
Aurae is one of the newest glasses out there and I am still finding ways to use it. For the focal I made some glass shards out of it and then applied to a base bead the broken up pieces of thin glass. If you don't know what or how a shard is made I take a hollow mandrel, think of a straw made out of stainless steel, and then melt around the end over and over again th Aurae glass until I have made a ballon of glass. The hole of the mandrel is not closed over during this process which gives me the ability to blow into the metal tube making the balloon of glass expand to a thin walled balloon of glass. Then after knocking this ball off of the mandrel I then break up this really interesting balloon into pieces. Next time I will take a picture of what this looks like. On the focal you can see some of the pieces that ae laid across the base bead. The shards are left raised and then after getting the look I'm going for the whole bead is waved through a high propane flame (reduction flame) to bring out the shine. This glass is the most beautiful gold glass. It is so rich and shiny! 
As you can see in the slices they are perfect for earings or even as part of a necklace or bracelet. I have made them two ways; with the hole up more towards the top or more centered. Since they are an irregular form centering isn't really a perfect center. I'm taking this style and incorporating it now into using it with other types of glass. I will be posting more pictures later. A regular disk which is just glass that has been melted being wound onto a mandrel shows the glass in its first originally melted form as it leaves the rod. That is a very interesting way to see the variations in the original glass. But, I have discovered making the slices that it is like actually taking a slice out of a fully melted piece of glass where it has had a chance to melt, change color and all the weird gradiations are there to be seen. Interesting development.
This is the latest in the spun glass series and I really like the way they came out. This time I did a combination of dark royal blue and the Lustre and it really sparkles. It took a few trys to get it right on the rounded form instead of a barrel, which is so much easier to do the spun glass. On a round you can't do the same type of stringing of the bead like you do with a barrel which is a continued rounded area. I also discovered it was better to have a real round bead instead of a more donut shaped bead.
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