Metallic Beads

After several attempts at beading, that I wasn't happy with today, I came up with a fun idea with no glue involved. Not as messy as yesterday's beading project. I wanted to something metallic after seeing some fantastic art by Autumn Labbe-Reault, and Adrienne Goodenough. I had lots of 2" foil flashing tape left over from working on a technique Tim Holtz did on the Carol Duvall Show a few years ago. I cut the tape into 12" long strips and then cut them in half lengthwise.

I colored about 2 - 3" of one end of the foil tape with alcohol inks, butterscotch, wild plum & stonewashed.

I pulled off just enough of the backing to fold about 1" the non-inked end of the foil tape onto itself. This gave me a non-sticky surface to begin rolling around the bamboo skewer. Then I removed the rest of the backing, while rolling the foil tape on to itself. This foil back tape sticks to itself really well. Before I got to the colored portion of the foil tape, I began creating wrinkles to give the bead some texture. As I finished rolling, the outer surface of the bead was colored and cool looking.

I wanted to put a protective coating on the beads, so they would retain their shape and add some micro beads for add texture and color. I rolled the bead into a pad of clear embossing ink, dipped it into Ultra Think Embossing Enamel (UTEE) and heat set it. I dipped and heat set with UTEE two more times. While the last coat of UTEE was still hot and runny, I dipped the bead into the micro beads and let cool. I found this last step easier to do with the bead at the very end of the skewer. When the beads were cool, I brushed off the excess micro beads. Here is a picture of the finished beads:

Now I can sign up for a second set of beads in the bead swap on ccswaps.