The Process: cleaning beads

So first of all I want to say thank you to all the well wishes from everyone- it helped me bring me out of misery :)

So... after I am done making the beads, they are put in a kiln to anneal, and then when they're cool I have to clean them.




Lots of the beads I make are made on what is called a mandrel. When the metal and glass are hot they'll stick together so the end of the mandrel is covered in bead release (looks a lot like clay slip) before forming the bead.



When you pull the bead off the bead release likes to stick in the middle.

I like to soak the beads a bit to loosen the bead release.








And then I remove the bead release with a tool called a bead reamer or just a really small file from the hardware store.



Or if I have 18 million beads to do






Or I use my dremel tool if I have 18 million beads to do.







All clean :)

Apologies

Sorry I've been absent from blogging and commenting on blogs the past day or two. I've been feeling mostly like this:





Thought I was doing better today, but I am quickly running out of steam and succumbing to the pain. I promise a substantial post tonight and to visit all you other lovely bloggers if I can shake this soon.

Baa

So my webmaster tools (they tell me different stats about my blog) haven't been working for a couple months and I finally decided to investigate why, and then fix it.

I then checked out the top search queries and found one of them was "Extreme sheep herding".

This left me with two questions:

1. What the hell is that?

2. Why does my blog come up for that search?

Well to answer the first question:



And now there is an actual reason for my blog to come up in the search.