I know posts here have been few and far between of late….all I can say is that I am really busy right now with bead orders, getting ready for the Gathering and also with a new huge project I am working on. I haven’t given up on Coloraddiction - I promise! I just won’t be posting a huge amount of new info this summer. Just a few tidbits here and there about newer colors I think.
Happy May! 
Now we can make our own pattern palettes at ColourLovers. Ah crap. There goes another hour!!
So Vetrofond, our favorite Odd Lot glass maker, has come out with yet another huge assortment of weird colors for us to try out. This is what…the fifth batch? I do applaud them for listening to their customers and for really trying to put out new and inventive glass for us.
But enough with the orange filigrana, please!! 
I mean, have you SEEN the latest batch of odds? Almost all oranges and greens. And ALL filigrana - a dark color covered in a contrasting lighter color, for a marbled look.
I say that with love and hope that Vetrofond will soon hear me and come out with some great new opaque purples and pinks. Actual pinks. Not faded out pale translucent pinks. Stellar purples. Not greyed out, reactive purples.
It’s true that Vetrofond is likely catering to those beadmakers who really love reactive glass - who adore making organic beads and messing with different metallic reactions. I guess I am just one of those rare glass-lovers that love plain, pure, stable colors that I can combine and layer without reactions.
Don’t get me wrong - I do love reactions, sometimes. But not with every color.
We have enough of those now, I think. Double Helix, Vetrofond, ASK, Lauscha and other makers are really pumping out the silver based, filigrana, reactive, organic and weird. It’s fun to experiment with them - to a point.
One other thing - if you’ve been buying all this new glass, you’ve probably realized by now that the paddle pics shown on the vendors web sites do not often relate to the real thing when you personally melt the glass. I’ve still not been able to get that sweet marbly pink and cream from Sweet Strawberry. Just a rusty, tomato red. Pink #3 Pastel was nothing but almost white for me. Orange Punch never looked like the paddle pic - it stayed a translucent red, no matter what I did. And the gorgeous Poppy? Hard to turn pink, like the paddle - mostly a luscious…..yep, you guessed it……orange. I am afraid to buy the brand new Jupiter - it looks so yummy in the paddle, but who knows if I will actually get that color for reals.
So…. Vetrofond? Please? A deep, vivid opaque purple. A bright opaque pink. A sweet opaque apricot or peach. Pretty please. And no more orange. For the love of GOD no more orange.
So I had some serious cabin fever today. Since I am doing a project for Step By Step Beads, and have a very limited amount of time to get some supplies, I decided to take a little trip to Shipwreck Beads. I love living in Washington, because not only am I within driving distance of half a dozen glass manufacturers and dealers, I am also only a short 1 1/2 hours away from one of the largest bead stores ever. Shipwreck mostly does mail order and online sales, but they also have a storefront in Lacey. Okay, make that a……warehouse. Because OMG……it’s huge!
I’d never been there before today, and let me just say this: It’s a damn good thing they have a little deli/cafe thingie in the middle of the store, because I needed to keep my blood sugar up and myself caffeinated for this place. I’ve never seen a bead store this gigantic. I literally had issues with my eyes going wiggy after about 30 minutes in there. The sheer amount of color and sparkle will most likely cause Sensory!Overload! for anyone who is a creative soul.
As for selection - it’s pretty good, as you may imagine. I mean, after all, did I mention the size of the building? I was a little surprised by the total lack of selection of decent findings there - unfortunately. Most of what they had was base metal, and what they did have of good metal was really generic. But the rest of the merchandise made up for that lack.
They have an amazing amount of Czech glass beads - it seemed like that pretty much took up half the store. any size/color/finish you can imagine in Czech - it’s there. I had to yank my eyes away from the gorgeous firepolished stuff after I picked out a couple things I needed.
Another quarter of the store seemed to be taken up by giant bins of bagged generic Indian glass beads - which was kind of off-putting for me. I am a glass bead snob - I don’t apologize for it. :D Which brings us to the gi-normous aisle of Chinese lampwork beads….ahh well. Didn’t see any artist-made lampwork, but I wasn’t expecting to, since they are a high-volume online and mail order seller mostly. I usually only see the handmade stuff in smaller bead stores.
One nice thing is that they had a decent selection of both Swarovski and Preciosa brand crystal beads, in a bunch of different shapes and colors. Two whole aisles of crystals - I spent a lot of time in that section. It literally caused me pain to have to leave that area without buying a whole lot more than I did. In a store like that, you need to stay on track or you’re sunk. Hence the name.
I was desperate for more Bali/Thai sterling beads, but alas, there were almost none to be found there. They did have some sterling, but it was mostly unidentifiable and pretty generic. They did have a few nice toggle clasps, but they were really expensive. Most of the sterling was - but that’s no surprise in this economy.
As for gemstones - yep, they have em. Hanging all over one of the walls and taking up a couple of aisles of their own. I had to refrain, but they had some really great choices. I drooled over all of them and had to walk away. Sniff. They also had a decent selection of books, stringing materials, bead storage and tools.
That’s all I can honestly remember, because it’s all becoming a blur of color now that I am home with my modest purchase of $33.77. I am sure Shipwreck has way more than I have mentioned here…you’ll just have to take a trip there and check it out. Try not to have a time limit or a….um….budget.
Oh, no. Another color website to hook you in. And this one is a doooozy! Create your own palettes and colors, and see what others are creating! It’s like a blog, where you can rate and comment on others’ color offerings. There are zillions of possibilities for inspiration and pure time-wasting. Bask in the bliss of color. And don’t shoot the messenger!
Here are some of the palettes I have created:
Beadmakers. Have we all gone insane? When it comes to glass color, I would say - yep. We’re nuts. Dangle a newly-released rod color in front of us and we salivate. I think it all started when Effetre released their Handmade line back when I first started making beads, a little over five years ago. All of a sudden there were these new colors out - most of them opaque - that looked completely different than any other glass out there. At least to my newbie eyes they did.
Some rods were giant, some were teeny, some were even cone-shaped. And because they were all handpulled at the factory, instead of pulled by machines, we could see all the different batches and had fun picking our favorites.
We all drooled over the new Opaque Purple, which turned out to be a nightmare for some, earning it the name Evil Devitrifying Purple. Gorgeous, but eeeeeevil. I probably won’t have it reviewed here on Coloraddiction, because I am……EDP challenged. We got excited by Copper Green and the dark version of Teal transparent. We saw a bunch of new opaque pinks, some of which were….weird (Tongue, Powder). We marveled at the new violets and the Sage and Avocado greens. We wondered what the heck Effetre was thinking when they named their new dark pine green transparent “Dark Sage”.
At that same time, we also saw Effetre’s coolest mistake ever. The enigmatic and hard to find Streaky Pink. Effetre just thought they made a crappy batch of their Dark Pink 256 (or was it Light Pink 260?)….but no. That glass was seriously cool, at least in my opinion, and led to the Streaky Pink craze, where beadmakers were buying and selling this glass online for several hundred dollars a pound - sometimes even more. I admit to falling prey to its siren’s call over and over again. I even became known online as the Queen of Pink – and probably other, less attractive names – when I began showing all my pink beads to everyone. People thought I was crazy to pay what I did for an opaque pale pink shade. But what I did with it turned out to be quite nice – if I do say so myself.
I think it was that one glass color that brought on the Odd Lot insanity we see now in the glass market. Mistakes made by glass manufacturers are now called Odd Lots - and they have discovered that we beadmakers are defenseless against the temptation of buying every single Odd Lot out there. One glass company, Vetrofond, has pretty much become Odd Lot Central to us. They release a new Odd Lot practically every hour. And the colors are becoming more and more complex and dare I say….freaking cool. They started with Coral 420 (how many batches are there of that – 20 or so?) and worked their way through to some really interesting tri-color and organic shades.
To keep up with the insanity of us beadmakers, we have seen a surge of new glass companies starting up that specialize in their own new color formulas. Since I started in the lampwork field, I have seen Vetrofond start their Odd Lots, Double Helix (which specializes in handmade silver glass colors), Creation Is Messy (CIM), ASK 104 (a partnering of Arrow Springs and Kugler), Precision aka R4 (which was primarily a borosilicate maker, but is coming out with 104 coe silver glass) and more. All these makers create soft glass in the 104 range, and are adding new colors to their line all the time.
There’s just so much more out there, choosing glass is almost confusing, and a whole lot more exhilerating than it used to be. We beadmakers are eating it up. Just look at the bidding wars on ebay that happen when a rare color goes up for sale. We often stalk the smaller glass makers’ websites for brand new colors, and we buy them out of stock as soon as we possibly can. We bug the larger vendors on a constant basis about when we can expect whatever new color that has been previewed. They can barely keep up with our demand. Frantz Art Glass now has a newsletter dedicated almost completely to new colors. We’re just out of our minds. But we’re happy about it!
“When I First Started Making Beads….”You’re probably going to see me say that a lot in this blog. Seriously - things have changed dramatically in the glass world in the five years since I took my first beadmaking class. At least in my little corner of the glass world - the beadmaking section. New glass companies have come (and gone), new colors come out all the time, and more and more people are learning how to make beads and falling in love with glass. In this section of my blog, called “A Beadmaker’s Musings”, I’ll explore the crazy world of glass as it relates to me - one beadmaker among a gazillion.
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