A blown bead that is now a "squidgy"

Well here is one of those less than epic tails of a good bead..... turned bad....... turned good again, mostly by accident. You gotta love those!



I was making some more blown beads (smaller with a thicker wall so they can be tougher) when I got a bit keen and after puntying up and removing the blowpipe I was distracted by a cricket (not the lampworking torch, but an actual bug type cricket). The bugger landed on my arm, so after some screaming and waving around of the puntied up hollow bead I realised that I had overheated the bead somewhat and it has collasped quite a bit....... BUGGER (ok there were way more swear words at the time). Knowing that there was really no recovery from this point on, I grabbed the end of the bead with my tweezers and pulled to remove it from the punti....... well it went into an interesting shape!!! Seeing as I has been using some reichenbach multicolour swirled lightly over some transparent glass, I thought that if I could save it a "bit" and seeing as the hole was still intact (if not a bit twisted) that I might as well pop it in the kiln. I then went and repeated the exercise deliberately and this is what came out of the kiln and got strung up very basically this morning.

I have decided to call them "squidgies", they once were round but are now all squidgie-afied!


Hmmmmmm, I am very happy with these and they are really lovely and comfortable to wear. I am definitely going to make some more. I MAY even get Grace (my eldest feral girl at 12 years) to take some photos like a mini tutorial that I can load up for people just for fun.

I am in the middle of an EPIC email to a lovely friend....... its still coming, but I keep thinking of something else to add! Don't you hate it when you have been a slack mongrel and then you've built up an email the size of war and peace just to catch up on the basic stuff! Sometimes I need a good flogging I tell you!