Month: April 2024

Welcome back! I know I put off making this post for a while, but that was because I assumed I had taken photos of all of my beads already, and could therefore make this post whenever I wanted. Wrong! I took exactly one picture of my beads! I wish I hadn’t done that!

Nonetheless, here are my fun accent beads for this month’s design. The other beads that I didn’t grab pictures of are a collection of flat disc beads and two (larger than intended) segmented beads. Carving out the little “v” patterns on the center two beads was SO tedious. If you ever find yourself carving little designs into clay, I really recommend using both a scraper tool and some slim smoothing tool with a silicone end to blend out the rough edges. Shaping the beads themselves was the easy part, and I started with a standard sphere and worked from there for both shapes. I think you can figure out how to get the squash-esque shape, but for the biconal beads I rolled the sphere between two fingers on each hand. The gap between your fingers will create that lovely ridge around the middle, just be careful you don’t smush the ridge when you put the bead down!!

I’ve ordered a special black glaze that I hope will come in this week. I’ll be back with more updates when the glazing process is complete, see ya!

Veni vidi vici, or whatever. After many trials and tribulations this past week, I finally emerged victorious with my komboloi beads. Let me recap the whole process so you can all understand the comedy or errors that went down in the art room:

First of all, even after spending hours last week making the holes on these beads bigger, most of them still ended up too small to properly fit on the bead rack I use for glazing. I’m not sure if I’ve explained this before, but you have to use a bead rack when glazing beads of else the glaze will melt and fuse your beads to the bottom of the kiln. So, after a failed attempt to drill a bigger hole in one bead (it exploded and burned my hand. Wear PPE, kids) I decided to suck it up and just shove the beads onto the sticks as hard as I could, praying they wouldn’t fall off in the firing.

You can see here that these poor beads were dangling dangerously on the edge of each rack like very small barbells. Nonetheless, luck was on my side and none of them fell off. I used the same technique I used on the test squares and gave them two coats of Carrot with one coat of Amber glaze, which actually turned out great! I’m also very proud of the glazing work I did on my owl this time around, because it wasn’t easy. You have to be really patient when you’re painting with white glaze because if you get any other color glaze on your hands and smudge the white, it’s all over.

Because of some exploded fallen soldiers (beads), I ended up with a much shorter string that I intended. I still made sure it followed the komboloi rules as a multiple of 4, but it ended up as more of a wristlet than a rosary. I’ve put the results below, so go on and check out how they ended up! These might be my favorite beads so far, and they taught me a very important lesson about clay shrinkage: make all of your clay stuff 1.5x as big as you think it should be.

See you next time!