Bits and Pieces

So what else can you do with pieces of stained glass? My friend Beth cut me some small squares out of this wavy celadon-green glass. I’m sure stained glass people have a very descriptive and technical name for it, just like beaders know what you mean when you say you used Chalk White Senegal Luster Picasso SuperDuos when making a bracelet. This glass looked like a little slice of ocean waves but with streaks of fuchsia and glints of chartreuse in its depths. Pink and green are colors I actually tend to work with quite a bit, even though they still make me think of the preppie fad from the early 1980s, which was all about pink and green. This, however, is not a necklace for preppies.

 

I call it my “Garden Plot” necklace and it evolved over time. I got the Right Angle Weave (RAW) frames for the stained glass squares figured out first, but then came the challenge of creating a component, a beaded something which harmonizes with your focal pieces, which I always have trouble with. How to join up the frames? It may be that by the time it came to join them I was tired of all those right angles and my subconscious coughed up a variation – beaded circles.

Of course, these are RAW circles, so my subconscious wasn’t going completely off the rails.

Here’s what the back looks like. Sometimes that can be as interesting as the front of a piece of beadwork.

I’m showing you this because quite often I get really hung up doing multiple rows of Right Angle Weave and they end up looking like they decided to rugby tackle each other. I’m not showing you the one where that happened! This is a modest, well-behaved piece of RAW.

Dichro Delights

One of the pleasures of working with stained glass cabs is that you can find dichroic versions. Dichroic glass (ahem, tuning up the ubiquitous but useful Wikipedia music here) is made with two different colors, which shift in the light as it moves. It’s done with metals, so those colors really blaze, which satisfies my bling-y urges. I have lots of dichroic fused glass art beads but imagine my delight when I encountered scrap bags of dichroic stained glass at the local shop in Frederick, MD.

My friend Beth, the stained glass artist, took me there and we both lit on one large piece of dichroic glass. But she got to it first and bought it, so I made a deal with her. I’d make her a necklace with the cut cab shape of her choice if she gave me a cab of the stuff to make something for myself.

Here is Beth’s necklace:

Well, it will be a necklace. No wait, it is now a necklace. I forgot to photograph the final result.

This was also a fun design challenge – beading around sharply-pointed corners.  I knew I wanted to create a frame of beaded tubes with a pattern that riffed on the cab’s colors and effects but what the heck should go around those acute angles? Cubic Right Angle Weave to the rescue again!  I beaded two “V’s” in bronze seed beads and they fit perfectly. For the third angle, I got the idea of letting some fringe spill out of the two tubes, and made sure they were dripping lots of Swarovski crystals.

So what did I do with my cab?

Ta-DAH!!  This was a design that grew out of my summer exploring some Contemporary Geometric Beadwork stitches (a post for another day). These photos, alas, do not do that dichroic glass justice.

And there was an added dividend, which I will show you in my next post.