Most of what's on my bead table are the goodies I got at the Dallas Bead Market Sunday. My friend Billye and I went to the show together.
I got these vintage Czech glass beads and found objects from Carol Wille of Jeweled Treasures. I was really happy to find these.
Donna Rasco was there from Unique Creations and I picked up some fleur de lis and these cool retro rocket charms. I'm going to make some earrings for myself from the rockets, but I think I'll get some more and make cuff links. I would like to make some guy stuff but I almost never figure out what to make.
I fired up my Lenk 500 torch today and balled up the ends of this copper and brass wire. This was the first time I had used this torch. It's a little more robust and hotter than my other micro torch. I had some trouble finding the sweet spot in the flame. Even though the air was still outside, the spot seemed to move around. I finally gave up and went inside and turned on the stove vent and did it on the stove. Success!
The top wire is hardware store brass which must be yellow brass. It was a little harder to work with and you can see it didn't have hardly any color from the torch. The second wire is jewelry supply red brass. I'll be using it from now on instead of the hardware store stuff, at least if I need to torch it. The bottom two are copper.
These will be made into clasps. I learned how to do these in Deryn Mentock's Buildzone online class. She just started another round of her online class, "Towers and Turrets." Check it out; there's still time to sign up.
Heather over at HumbleBeads started a Flickr group and blog posting of what's on her beading table every Wednesday. It's a fun and interesting pool of pictures.
2 comments:
I LOVE your finds in that first photo -- and I was interested to read about how the various wires worked with your torch. I've been battling copper and brass with my little torch and have been wondering if it's me, the torch, or what!
Going inside where i could dim the lights really helped me. It was much easier to find the sweet spot. Also i found that if i slanted the wire away from the torch so that a little more of it is in the flame it did better.
The zinc in brass is bad to breath though. Red brass has less zinc and i think it balled better. I was using 14ga for three wires and 16 ga for the other.
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