Tips & Techniques: Making Bright Transparent Beads with Shards

I have been experimenting for a while with using some of the denser Messy Color/CiM transparents as shards over clear beads to create brighter, lighter versions of these beautiful colors.

The colors that I think fall into this category are:

• Sangre – 511128
• Slytherin – 511483
• Leaky Pen – 511508
• Great Bluedini – 511590  ( also 511590-1 and 511590-2)
• Cranberry Pink – 511926-2 (this is a darker shade than regular 511926)

Sangre was the first Messy Color transparent that I really worked a lot with in this manner because it is such a beautiful Christmas Red.  If I tried to make a solid Sangre core for a bead base, it would come out looking almost black because there is so much pigment in the glass, which was not the look I was going for.

A solid tabular bead of Sangre, showing how dense this transparent color can be.	A bead made of clear and covered in Sangre shards to keep the red thin and bright , decorated with Ekho stringer.

Blowing shards of Sangre and placing them over a clear core produces eye popping bright red beads that glow when light hits them.  They look so good that I want to eat them.

If you are interested in producing a controlled design out of these very dense transparent colors, you can produce a very thin ribbon cane out of one of these colors and lay it down over a white base.

To make a ribbon cane, I make a wide end punty out of clear glass and put three or four 1 ½ inch rod pieces of what ever color I want and heat and mash the rod pieces into a glass wafer/rectangle, making sure to flatten out all the dips between the rods.  I then put a punty on the other end of the wafer and heat it to the point that I can pull out a 2 foot ribbon cane.

A white-heart bicone bead made with Sangre ribbon cane over Peace	A bead made with Peace core, covered in Sangre shards and decorated with a Aurae stringer and encased with clear.

If you have never tried to use these transparent colors as shards or ribbon cane, you should give it a shot and see what you come up with.

A solid tabular bead made with Leaky Pen, shows how dense this beautiful transparent blue can be.	Leaky Pen applied over a bead of Peace, showing what a lovely shade of blue you can achieve with a thinner application of Leaky Pen.

Large bicone of clear glass covered in Sangre shards and decorated with Aurae bumps and dots.	Round clear bead covered in Shards of  Unique Great Bluedini  51159-2 to create a brilliant teal green.	Round clear bead covered in shards of Unique Great Bluedini  511590-1, which shows what a beautiful blue this color is.