A new Treasure Bottle bead

I have been making more of my treasure bottle focal beads. They take so long to make that I stagger away from the flame...but I love making them! This one is an inch and a half tall
 (c 4cm) - the pictures show both sides of one bead. They are really hard to photograph and come to life in the hand as is often the case with glass. See my post in May last year for the story behind these.

Beachcomber bracelet

Forum challenge beads

Final bracelet

Quite some time ago I took part in a forum challenge, exchanging images to kick-start a new beadset idea. I was lucky enough to receive a beautiful photo of a harbour at night and made these. I hoarded them for ages before recently deciding to make a knotted bracelet out of some of them adding a stoneware and copper clasp, stoneware cogs and lampwork discs.

 I like to age my copper, but inadvertently used coated wire which refused to darken, lesson learned. As well as this pitfall, I decided I wasn't too fond of the grey cord, so decided to darken it with coffee. This would have done the trick if the cord didn't turn out to be man-made, grr. So I bit the...chocolate, and re-threaded it on darker cotton cording. After all that, I decided to keep it and have worn it frequently this summer. I'm planning to  make a few more along these lines for my shop (minus errors!).

Before alterations