Lampworking day #21. More experiments!

I couldn't resist.  I took these this morning.  I actually woke up thinking about these beads and dying to get them off the mandrels and freaking out thinking they would break because they're so much bigger than anything I've done so far...

But they maaade ittttt... at least for now.  I can't wait to get my bead door and not worry so much about batch annealing. 

OK so here's what I did.  I made three small clear beads, to see if I could "see the tension with my polarizer" before and after annealing.  One died and the other two cracked.  WTF.  I had spent so much time without having a bead crack?  I don't know what I did different other than have them three on the same mandrel.  I don't understand.  Other people are constantly making lots of beads on one mandrel.  What did I do wrong?

Then I made this spherical bead with leftover glass from a failed murrini experiment and tried doing some clear dots on it just to test out the technique of putting dots that look like water drops. 

Thennnnn I took the rest of my crappy murrini glass and made this!  It's the biggest bead I've done so far.  It's all scrap.  Then I decorated with clear blue. 

This style decoration is inspired by my role model in life Sarah Hornik.  I did a lot of research to see if this would be considered plagiarism, but I really couldn't find anything that would convince me that it was.  In the art world, there is so much debate on the subject... And I have so many opinions of my own.  Which I won't bore you with.  I might actually just ask Sarah what she thinks about this but I'm kind of hesitant to open a big can of worms.  ...Though I'm sure I just have by posting the pics. 

Ok and then this one which is also from a murrini accident (the first one, actually) and with which I was playing with the shape... I feel like I learned a lot with this one and I'm wondering why I didn't just correct the shape while I could.  I guess I was just tired.  I still kind of like it though. 

Cheers.  I'm super excited.