I've been away from the torch for a couple of weeks with a chest infection, and I sometimes find it a little tricky to get back in the groove, so I decided to play with my scrap pot and only use the broken chips and tail ends of glass to make a few beads.

Scrap pot beads are pot luck, they generally look like you've mixed a lot of incompatible colours together and made burnt brown...
Occasionally the random colour options can give you a little gem.
I didn't make a lot this week, but that wasn't really the aim, I just needed to light up the torch again, but I liked a couple of effects and colour combinations the scraps offered, so I've got some ideas to play with when I'm back firing on all cylinders.


I often buy up other lampworkers boxes of ends, if you're making multiple pieces with the same colours to the same design it's quicker not to use the very end of the rod, short ends aren't easy to hold and they often have a label stuck around them which puts impurities into the piece. The unlabeled ones can be risky, a lot of glass colours present differently in their rod form to how they'll look when made into something.Â
Despite being waste to some, I like the unpredictable nature of scrap ends, I like trying colours I wouldn't have bought myself, the surprises add interest, and because I sometimes only have a little bit of an unknown colour, the beads are even more unique. It also has the added bonus of using something that's often waste to make a beautiful new product. So if you see a little world bead you like here, or at a show, you should buy it to stop someone else to get there first!
My aural company this week has been a mixture of a few favourite podcasts, mostly catching up with radio 4's life changing, definitely worth a listen.
Tiddly pom.
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