The beads came out great!

Woo! I made my first batch of beads on Sunday night, using yellow, medium blue and petrol green from my Tuffnells selection pack. I dipped the mandrels in bead release late in the morning, between the oh-so-exciting tasks of hanging out a load of washing and cleaning the bathroom, and stuck them in a handy polystyrene plank to dry. My top tip for coating mandrels? Tip some bead release into a tall, skinny double shot glass, then pour the mix back into the bead release pot. The mix will coat the side of the shot glass. If you roll the end of the mandrel around the inside edge of the glass, you'll get a nice even coating with almost no waste.

Once the release was dry (and I'd finished all my chores), I plonked myself down in my ancient sewing chair and lit the torch. This was a scary experience because Hot Heads are LOUD - much more so than the Nortel I used in my lesson, or than the bunsen burners we had in the lab, which are more similar to the Hot Head than the manufacturers might want to admit. However, I'm not one to be deterred by loud noises (if I was, I couldn't have married He Who Makes Noise), so I twiddled the knob until I was happy with the flame, and picked up my rod of yellow glass. I chose yellow to start with because it's the colour I'm least likely to use in jewellery, so I didn't mind wasting it on my first pieces!

Remembering my lesson, I carefully wafted the rod through the flame for a while until I judged it to be hot enough, then introduced it fully to the flame and let it melt into a nice ball (gather). Figuring I'd start with something easy, I pulled a couple of long strings of glass (stringers) from the yellow, for later use as decoration, then got busy. Keeping a gather from drooping into the flame while heating a mandrel is a weird combination of movements (it has been compared with rubbing your belly while patting your head, and I can't say as I disagree!), but I managed it, and pretty soon I had a roundish sort of blob around my mandrel. I kept twisting the glass slowly in the upper part of the flame until it looked rather more like a bead, then slowly let it cool a little, wafting in and out of the flame, before sticking it in between sheets of fibre blanked to properly cool down.

After that, I was off: another yellow bead, then a couple of blue beads with yellow stringer swirled around them, some blue stringer, some green beads with blue frit (crushed glass dust), blue beads with green stringer swirls and then - excitingly - some longer barrel beads rolled along my ridged steel block to make ribbed beads. At that point I realised that the parentals were due in half an hour and I hadn't made dinner, so I had to pack up - but here are the results of all that activity:

They might not all be perfectly formed (I'm working on it!), but after cooling in the fibre blanket for a few hours, then soaking overnight in tepid water, every single bead came off the mandrels, crack-free, and they're now clean and waiting for inspiration to strike so that I can make them into something pretty. Hurrah!