Kaplan Creations Jewelry and Glass Design

I’m not sure that this is exactly the same pattern as the piece I showed yesterday, but it is close (and from the same batch). I had fused it on top of a black base.

The last time I bought some dichroic glass, I bought it from a different source (online). It had really pretty patterns that I hadn’t seen before so I thought I’d try it out. Thankfully I didn’t buy too much of it because there seems to be a problem with the dichroic coating disappearing at a lower temperature than you’d expect. This happened to me twice. I thought the first time was my  mistake and maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention to the kiln (I wasn’t using a digital controller, but usually don’t for fusing small pieces). The second time I watched it carefully, and turned off the kiln at exactly the right point….and here are my results:

You can barely see any dichroic coating…it all burned off.

 I didn’t complain to the seller, just decided to stick with my usual sources from now on. Dichroic glass is too expensive to be throwing out….

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I found these really pretty fossilized coral beads about 2 months ago, and have been just letting them sit around on my beading table until I had some sort of idea. This morning I decided to use copper wire, some small copper beads, and Swarovski crystals and came up with this design. I think I will also do another one, with a different design, using silver wire.  This piece is also in my store.

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