There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of different coloured glasses available to buy today.  You can spend hours trying to find that perfect baby pink or even months hunting for that deep azure blue, but what happens when you get your special colour home and then start layering it together with other colours - as you inevitably will?

Glass generally comes in either transparent (see-through) or opaque (none see-through) form.  By layering and mixing these colours together you can create an infinite number of different colour and pattern combinations.

In this blog I will be playing with just two colours, Effetre White and Effetre Mid-Purple,  to see what difference the amount of glass, and how you use it, alters the look of a small handmade glass bead.

First off is layering, for this test I made 4 simple beads:

1.  Transparent mid-purple
2.  Thin core of white with a thick layer of purple encasing (covering) it
3.  Thick core of white with a thin layer of purple encasing  it
4.  Opaque white

From the above two photos I hope you can see the effect different thicknesses of glass has on the colour and transparency of a bead.  With the first, entirely transparent, purple bead (far left) you can clearly see the hole running through it, however with the other three beads you cannot due to the opaque white glass obscuring it.

Using this encasing method you can create thousands of different effects and colours, you can experiment by layering greens over reds, blues over yellows, transparent over transparent even with an opaque underneath!  You can add as many layers as you like, just be aware that any opaque layers will obscure all layers below therefore they should only be used as the first layer for this basic technique.

Next is dots, my favourite method of decoration!

Dots are extremely versatile...  You can pile them up, spin them, pull them and push them into particular shapes, even manipulate them into lines - but that is a whole book just waiting to be written!

For this experiment however, I was just looking at how the base colour and the number/type of dots effects the colourful look of the beads (photos below).  As before I only used Effetre Opaque White and Transparent Mid-Purple:

​1.  White base with raised purple dots
2.  White base bead with flattened purple dots
3.  White bead with purple and white layered dots
4.  Purple base bead with white then purple layered dots
5.  Purple bead with 4 large white dots entirely covered by large purple dots
6.  Purple base bead with white flattened dots
7.  Purple bead with white raised dots

As you can see from  the above photos, the beads that have a white base are much brighter in appearance and the purple seems lighter than the ones with the deeper coloured base and white dots.

By layering transparent glass with opaque glass you can achieve beautiful shadows, highlights and lowlights throughout the bead.  It is worth noting however, that if you try to apply transparent dots on to a transparent base they will often just disappear, therefore it is recommended that you insert a layer of white between the two transparent colours to add definition (as shown on bead 5 above).

In conclusion, the colour and pattern combinations provided by layering glass is almost endless, even if you are just using two types of glass!  So I recommend that you get experimenting and make your own tester beads - sometimes things go wrong and colours don't come out as you expected but other times something wonderful happens and you find your own unique dazzling combinations!

Go on, give it a whirl and let me know your results if you like.

I shall start with a confession... I am not a neat freak, I never have been and probably never will be!  

I am not very good at slowly and methodically unpacking my glass before selecting what I need to use and then finally returning any unused tools or glass to their rightful place once cool.  Instead I have been piling all my new glass rods into 'approximately matching' piles before grabbing what I need, adding it to the 'working pile' on my desk and then walking away at the end of the day!

Ever since I started lampworking in 2012 I have struggled with this neatness conundrum, I have tried to find a cheap and simple solution to my messy piles of glass.  I have used a maddening mix of elastic bands, plate racks, flower pots and plumbers tubing (the tubing seemed like a good idea at the time but trying to cut 2m long, thick plastic pipes into 25cm tubes took a lot more effort, time and mess than I thought). 

After a lot of searching I finally found the Glasscube on a Dutch website.  It sounded perfect but... they did not offer delivery so I had to collect it in person at the annual Flame Off at Uttoxeter Race Course earlier this year.  At £35 it was not a cheap solution so I only bought one, but with 36 holes and sturdy design it seemed like a worthy purchase.

 Luckily the tubes came with strong plastic ties that kept them in neat bundles that slotted straight into my Argos shelving unit.  This meant I could just slide them into place and then start filling them with all my glass rods.

The result was amazing, a cheap and easy glass storage solution that lets me see immediately how much glass I have, what I am running out of and what types of colours I have very little of.

I suspect, over the years the tubes will probably begin to show signs of wear and tear and then I will have to decide whether to replace them with new tubes or splash out on some more sturdy cubes, it will all depend on how well they last I guess.

I generally use a mixture of Effetre, CiM, Reichenbach and Double Helix glass to make my lampwork beads.  All these glasses can be used together but the three last brands of glass are often more expensive than the standard colours of Effetre so I have chosen to store them in the Glasscube to keep them separate.

I hate to admit it, but this little bit of neatness has made my studio more workable and made grabbing more glass half way through crafting a hot bead a little easier... maybe my desk will be next for the tidy up!