Lampwork beads - my first attempt!

I have always loved colorful beads.   I am particularly fascinated by the beauty of lampwork beads, beads made by hand in the flame of a hot torch.  And I've wanted to learn to make them for quite some time now.  So yesterday I spent the day taking an introductory lampwork class at the wonderful Adirondack Folk School in Lake Luzerne NY.  Here's what I made.

I was very proud that my beads mostly turned out pretty round, and that some of them are somewhat attractive!  I wasn't particularly successful at making dots, so I melted my lumpy lopsided dots into the beads and swirled them a bit.

 I tried making a cube bead and a barrel bead (below), but they are pretty misshapen and overworked.

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 The bead on the right in the photo below is actually a root beer color.

 Below, my favorite bead.

 

Sorry the photos aren't better.  I have cropped them quite a bit.

 My colors are a little muddy, because I worked a little too close to the flame, but I don't think these are too bad for my very first efforts!

Two new photos - me at the torch:

 

A delightful and creative day!

The day's fun began with a yummy lunch at the Main Street Ice Cream Parlor, just a short distance from both the school where I used to teach, and our lakeside 'camp'.  I was there with two friends/former colleagues: the wonderful high school art teacher (she's the leg on the left) and  'C' (the leg on the right), former 4th grade teacher and current middle school math teacher who you learned about in our prior adventures with henna, here, and here, and here.  Obviously, I am the leg in the middle on the top photo.

 Once lunch was done, we headed to the lake, where we spent the afternoon on the dock, sitting in the sunshine, sipping wine, painting our feet and legs with henna.  Does it get any better than this? 

Somehow a little henna also landed on my arm.  There has to be a dragonfly somewhere, right? 

And of course I took a few minutes to play around with some of the special settings on my camera. 

 

 

 We will definitely have another henna-by-the-lake session again soon!  Only next time we will use some NEW henna, so that the color will 'take' better. (My leg designs are a faded orange-brown color today, which doesn't show up well at all on my tan leg.  My foot looks a bit better, with the color a bit richer.  We need a new batch of henna!)