Mewkittie Creations

I’ve been having fun playing with frit. Frit is small broken pieces of glass. People blend different colors together to make a pleasing color palette. Hot beads can be rolled or dipped into frit so it sticks to the outside, then it gets melted into the bead. I encase my beads with clear afterward because magnifies the colors.

This is The Mandrel’s Wild Lupine frit.

I’m trying to learn how to manipulate dots and do multi layer dots where they distort into different shapes. For me, this is not an easy task. My hand-eye coordination is sorely lacking so when it comes to precision, it’s tough for me. I know if I practice, I will get better. Here’s the first beads I made. I tried some simple techniques, like raking the dots towards the center. It looks better when there are more dots on top of dots but I didn’t want to spend an hour doing dots just to mess it up.

The top picture shows one side of the bead and the bottom is the flip side. I did the last one with a different design on each side. Still need a lot more PPP!!!

Then, I made another black and white kitty since I’m sending one to a gal that said it looks like her cat, Bootsie.

There’s a cat bead exchange happening on the glass bead makers forum that I thought I might join. I made a few kitties last night. These are some small kitties. All are less than an inch tall.

Then I played with more of The Mandrel’s frit. Still working with the Berry-licious one, I used it on a light turquoise base bead.

Then I tried a bead that I learned in the silver glass class I took last week. Now I know I don’t like making these types of beads. I like the way they look, just don’t like making them. Still, I wanted to see if I could repeat what I learned in class. It’s always good to know how to work different glasses, never know when I might use them.

I might have over reduced it a bit but it still sparkles, more than in the picture.

While I was taking the silver glass class last week at The Mandrel, Donna had made some new frit colors. Of course I had to buy some to try. The first one is called Blueberry Stains. I really like it. It’s subtle and seems to work on a variety of base colors.

The frit looks different on the different color bases. I think this frit works well on both dark and light color bases.

This next one is called Berry-licious. I like it too. I need to try it on different base colors. It’s more of a transparent frit and I love, love, love the bright fuchsia color.

I used different color base beads and the first bead with the dots on it was too close to the frit color. This frit looks good on lighter colors, though I haven’t tested it on too many dark colored glasses.

Last weekend I took a silver glass class. Silver glass is a type of glass that has metal in it and depending on how it’s worked, can produce a bunch of different colors and finishes. I love the look but I could never achieve it myself. These are three beads I made from the class. They aren’t very good beads but I did learn how to work the glass. It’s always tough making beads in a class, trying to learn a new technique, along with using different equipment. I’m fairly pleased with these and I can’t wait to try to reproduce what I learned at home.