Cab me up scotty! but throw some beads in for good measure!

Yup, I have made cabochons before, but mostly those cheating puddle of glass which I generally refer as my dead bead graveyard.  You know the ones where you clean your dodgy old beads really well then ramp the kiln up to "puddle-ising" temperature and then ramp back down through an annealing cycle.  Well, on my list yesterday was to make a few off mandrel more complex boro cabochons.  I figured it would be MUCH easier to make these off mandrel than to use a cabochon mandrel and then have the buggers fall off.  Generally speaking I find that working with boro is hard enough on the bead release and mandrel let along expecting it to cling precariously onto a flat surface... plus it is not really necessary.

I thought I would make a couple owl cabochons first off and after making the first one realised... woah, how would someone cab around the ears and head?  So to help out I popped on some clear in those areas so the back of the cab was basically oblong and at least rounded off somewhat but left the  owl sort of raised up a bit.  After this first one and the fiddling about with the clear, I figured I might as well try making a small flattish owl and then applying that to a flat disc of clear and see how that works out.... much better and easier to do as it turned out.  The large blue owl (with the slightly smudgy eyes after all my buggerising about with the backing) was the first one and the little white owl is the one I applied separately.

The other cabochons I worked on which could be fun for the seed beady types to play with was some eyeball cabs.  They came out well and were rather easy to make, but I am getting dangerously low on that lovely iris cane, so I might have to give them a break for a while I reckon. 

Here is a pic of some of yesterday's efforts, cabs and some beads.  I have popped a couple beads onto beadable pendant bars for selling at our local florist (someone I have been promising some stock to since May..... BAD Nat!) and since that is on my list of to do's I am starting to get them ready for her.

Have a lovely week everyone,

Nat :-)

Parrot prototype using rainbow feather murrini

Now, whilst I was in my recent murrini-fest obsession (still not out of it to be honest) I was going to make a parrot head murrini. I have in fact made parrot murrini before, early on in my murrini making career (if you can call it that) and after the gorgeous Jan Cahill showed me a beautiful bead made by the VERY talented Kim Fields I wanted to make myself a parrot bead in the Kim Fields style too. Sooooo..... rather than invest loads of time in making a parrot head (which would look rather two dimensional on a 3D parrot) I made some rainbow feather murrini which is fast and easy to make!

I had to force myself not to look again at the bead Jan showed, I did NOT want to copy in any way, but only use the memory of the bead for inspiration and this is what I came up with (and got out the kiln this morning).I am quite pleased with the look of the bead, but feel that I can make VAST improvement on the placement of the green feathers and the colour of the rest of the parrot. You can see the rainbow feathers on the back look quite good, but I am also thinking that I need to make some feather murrini with different colour combos to more accurately imitate real life parrot colours! I do think the murrini would have looked better with the Pea Green as the end colour and therefore show more of that colour which would blend better with the rest of the green feathers!

Oh well, live and learn. I am thinking that I might try to make some pink graduated feathers and apply myself to making a Major Mitchell pink cockatoo! I was also thinking that some pink feathers would look good on my mate's (Maxine - glass by girlfriday) Pink Flamingo's.