Rachelle Keller

Picking up where I left off a couple months ago, I mentioned that my ladybug beads would naturally evolve into bigger and better things. This post will work backward chronologically. A “special request” led me into attempting to make sculptural lampwork beads. I began with creating ladybugs. As I played with the glass, all the time experimenting with colors, shapes and sizes, my ladybugs eventually evolved into…bees? When you look at the bees you might think, “Well, that's easy, just make stripes of black and yellow going around the bead.” Wrong. That would be true if the bead hole ran horizontal —from nose-to-tail, so to speak. To get the stripes with a vertical bead hole I need to actually “build” the stripes one on top of the other. You can see the stripes aren't “uniform”, and that drives the OCD in me crazy, but in nature the stripes on bees aren't “perfect”—in nature bees don't have awesome oogly-googly eyes either… Wasn't this post about ladybugs? Oh ye