A Bead is Born

While making my January Bead of the Month I snapped some photos of how I make my beads.  I thought you'd enjoy seeing what goes into each and every one of my disk beads.

First - it starts with color.  I love Brandi's color palettes that she makes for the Art Bead Scene. I print them out and start custom mixing my colors to match. 

Next, the colors are formed into round beads.

And here comes the hard part - I sketch out my canes and start to create them. 

The designs run horizontally in those tubes.

Paper thin slices of the designs are applied to each bead.  We then roll the clay smooth, shape each bead, poke the hole, bake and artfully arrange them before we tie them up into sets.  Jess is my official bead roller.  He takes forever, but he just does such a great job.

Here are the finished beads.  I only made 12 sets.  These sets each month are only available to my Bead of the Month Club subscribers.  I used the rest of the canes to make other beads and created leaves, birds and flowers to match, those can be found in my Etsy shop. 

 

I'm offering five more Bead of the Month Club subscriptions for the 10 months left in the year.  Each month I take the inspiration painting from the Art Bead Scene's monthly challenge and jump off from there.  If you buy the BOM Club, you don't need to take part in the challenge, that's just my inspiration.