Guinea Pig

Lampworker extraordinaire Amy Waldman-Smith has been chosen to teach at Bead & Button this June in Milwaukee. To prepare, she is teaching a couple of practice classes this weekend at Beadfx and I volunteered to be one of her guinea pigs. Today, we learned how to make little beads, focusing on the details - making and decorating round and spacer beads with dots, stringers and twisties.

Here's Amy giving a demonstration for us:

and here are some of the beads she made during those demonstrations, all of which I really liked and all of which are no good, because they didn't make it into the kiln to be annealed properly overnight. They're perfectly formed and decorated but unannealed, you could grind them into dust with your bare hands (but please don't, they are glass, after all!)

Tomorrow's class is "Hippy Dippy Flowers", which is one of Amy's specialties and something I have wanted to learn how to make for a long time. I have tried making them on my own, without much success. Hopefully, after tomorrow, I'll have better luck!