Show Prep

Unlike you may think, I don’t torch right up until the night before a show try­ing to make as much prod­uct as pos­si­ble. Tonight, in fact, was likely my last ses­sion on the torch before this weekend’s Down the Street Bead Show.

Any­thing that’s made on a man­drel — that means beads — has to be cleaned after it comes out of the kiln and off the man­drel. That means haul­ing out the handy Dremel and zap­ping all the bead release out of the mid­dle, under water. Yes, it’s messy! Once the beads are cleaned and dried, they have to be sorted and culled. The wonky ones go into the Infa­mous Wonky Box, first-​quality exper­i­ments go into the Orphans box, and sets have to be matched up and grouped together before going on dis­play. Sets and focals also have to be inven­to­ried and priced. The beads have to be placed into the appro­pri­ate box or on the rods for the big upright dis­play so that when we get to the show, we just put the rack together and it’s ready.

Actu­ally, I had intended to just do pen­dants tonight, since they are not made on a man­drel and there­fore don’t need bead release cleaned out. All I have to do is pull them out, rinse them off, and voila! ready for inven­to­ry­ing and tag­ging. But I real­ized that I had most of a really cool twisty remain­ing from torch­ing last week, and that I should really fin­ish off that set. So I did reg­u­lar beads, and teeny beads for ear­ring pairs, and a small focal bead to use it up. Then came the pen­dants — two hearts and two stones. I’m hop­ing that the odd lot batch of Solara I got recently strikes as nicely on pen­dants as on the two exper­i­men­tal beads from last week. If it does, it’ll be used for a lot more heart pendants!