Today I listed these earrings on folksy and I thought I'd share with you all how I "made" the frosted glass hearts.
I cannot make glass beads. I don't have the kit or a kiln for annealing. One day... maybe. These hearts started out as shiny glass beads. I decided to experiment after thinking about sea glass. I love the look of sea glass. Some people make fantastic jewellery from it. Well, the frosted look of sea glass is caused by the buffeting of sand in the sea.... so I thought I'd try popping some glass beads in my rock tumbler with some rock tumbling grit. (I also put some pebbles in there too but I prob wouldn't do this again as I did get some broken beads.) DO NOT use the same barrel as you use for polishing silver. You'll end up scratching your silver if you do. If you don't have polishing grit then you could probably use sand- it works in nature after all!!
I haven't got a before pic for the beads I'm afraid. I didn't think about it. It was a spur of the moment experiment. I do have some of the same beads that I didn't pop in though but not all. Basically I chucked in any glass beads I didn't really care about and one or two of ones I liked.
These smokey drops are interesting. I put 6 in the tumbler but took out 2 after about an hour. I left the remaining 4 in there for a couple more hours. Different looks with the same grit!! I have 3 different grits (46, 220 and 360) and the beads were all tumbled with the very rough 46 grit. I wonder what would happen if I moved up the git sizes? I would imagine the frosting would become more refined. More experimenting is required, methinks :o)
