Before firing…ah, so clean and pristine.

After firing…so pretty and colorful.

Here is a pile of Bronzclay beads before firing. Some of them are from a get together with fellow Lampwork artists, sisters Hayley and Helen, Sheryll, Sadie and Carol in the SF Bay Area.

Some of the others are ones I’ve been feverishly working on for the past two days. My hope is that most will sell on Etsy. There is probably more than 300 grams worth of beads in this picture.

While some of my Bronzclay beads are cooking in the kiln, I thought I’d show some of my hollow-formed beads that’s taken 2 days to complete- this is partly due to having a 6 month old and having to make these in steps.

There’s probably a way to cut my time down, I’ll have to experiment, I guess. Celie Fago I’m not, but I’m pretty proud of them.

They would’ve gone into the kiln with the others, except for the fact I would have been up til midnight waiting for the cycle to run its course before I could cool my kiln and take out the firing pan. This batch is for tomorrow morning since the firing will take approx. 10 hours to complete.

I try to meet up every month, when possible, with a group of lampworkers in the Bay Area- we call ourselves the Beady Gals.
Since I’d been interested in Bronzclay for a while, I ran the idea by the girls and we set a playdate to teach ourselves about Bronzclay. A couple of days beforehand I tried it out (see earlier post) and we were able to save time and make less mistakes when we met up.
The consensus seemed to be that although it was difficult to work with due to quick drying that caused brittleness, the price compared to PMC makes it worth trying to work around its pitfalls.

The beads from my dry run were able to be saved when they were refired properly, although they seemed just a little bit darker in appearance compared to the others.

These Bronzclay pieces are in their leather-hard state and about to be fired. They dried over night and I used approx. 50 grams of the clay. I’ve been wanting to try this medium since it’s more economical than PMC- which I’ve been too chicken to try out and mess up. The videos posted online at http://www.cooltools.us/ were very helpful and kept mistakes on my part to a minimum.

Unfortunately for me, living in an old house makes it hard not to trip a circuit breaker when we have too many things plugged in and running. Hard lesson learned this afternoon when it was tripped ThReE times due to the kiln going higher than my usual annealing schedule. We finally just plugged into the shed outlet and that seemed to work. Turns out bronzclay is as finicky as advertised since mine was not fully sintered. I plan on seeing if these pieces can be refired and sintered properly. The color is a nice old gold that is matte in appearance.

This focal bead, which is part of my Bound Series, was chosen and resides in excellent company amongst fabulously talented artists in Bead Review 3 (http://www.artofbeadmaking.com/) – look Ma, I’m published!