Mixed feelings
I don't get it. Pink, after all, is quite a popular colour; not one I tend to go for myself (unless it's full-on film-fogging fuchsia, in which case bring it!), but you do see quite a lot of it about, and not just on infant girls who get shoved into it willy-nilly by their parents. So I really don't understand why it's so hard to get hold of 3 mm bugle beads in that colour. I spent ages looking online the other day.
I use the bugles in two of my styles, the fractals and the 1920s, and the first of those is mostly made up of bugles so I do need a good variety. I was looking at them last week and I realised I had two lacunae in the colour range. One of them was in the yellow/orange area, but that wasn't really a problem. Yellow and orange are not greatly in demand, and I do have other beads in those colours for the people who do want them. But the other one was pink, and I realised I needed to fill that gap if at all possible. There will be significantly more people out there who want pink earrings than yellow or orange.
When I did finally run pink bugles to earth, they were a mixture, as you see in the feature photo; not only that but they were limited edition, so I can't get them again. They had nine bags of these things left. I bought the lot. Perhaps by the time I've got through them all, someone will be producing pink bugles on a regular basis.
On Monday morning I was just on the point of choosing the beads for a pair of fractal earrings when the order arrived. So I immediately shelved my plan to make a pair which was dual olivine/green iris (for the geeky and curious, when I make a two-colour pair, each branch can be taken to represent a binary number from 00000 to 11111, which is 0 to 31 in more familiar numbering; the beads are so arranged that every one of those numbers is represented), and decided instead to go for the pastel pink.
There was, of course, just one little problem there. I did have to sort out the dratted mix.
These beads come in 20 g bags, which at £2 each is extremely good value (it's quite possible to pay more than that for a 7 g bag, depending on the finish). It takes me about an hour and a half to unscramble one of those bags, and I did two of them on Monday, which I probably shouldn't have done, because both my arm and my back were complaining a little afterwards. So that's three hours, in which I could have made something around three pairs of earrings. Apparently there are people who find it very relaxing to sort out bead mixes; maybe I would if I wasn't trying to run a business here, but honestly all I can think of is the opportunity cost.
The following morning I was kind of fed up of looking at pink bugles, so I made the olivine/green iris pair instead. It came out very well. I do enjoy doing low-contrast duals.
On the bright side, I can (and certainly will) use all four shades; the pastel pink and the darkest shade (which is a rich cherry red) will be the most useful, but the two in the middle - a medium coral and a dark fuchsia - will also have their uses. The coral will work well with blues, though I do have some other coral-coloured beads. (Remember the other day I was talking about weird bead colour names? I forgot "Light Rosaline". "Rosaline" is only ever "light", as far as I can tell, and it means a very washed-out shade of coral.) And I have a whole lot of stuff in the deep pink/dark raspberry/purple area of the spectrum that'll look good with the dark fuchsia. It's also one of that perennially useful set of colours that look equally well with either gold or silver. In the photo it looks fairly distinct from the cherry red, and in fact they do look reasonably different once they are separated; but in the mix it's quite hard to tell one from the other without a good light, and because of that similarity I wouldn't use those two shades for duals like the olivine/green iris. Low-contrast is great, but I do want some contrast, just so you can tell it really is a dual. But the dark fuchsia certainly will pair nicely with the metallic dark raspberry, and that may well be the next pair of fractals I make.
Oh, and you recall I planned to make a pair of Ukrainian flag earrings? I did!
I didn't have quite the right blue, but the metallic turquoise looked a lot nearer the mark than the "baby blue" (actually somewhat purplish; I think I'd rather call it "forget-me-not"), so I went with that and it worked well. It's the best I could manage, but there are some improvements I'd have liked to be able to make. In particular I'd have liked yellow bugle beads, but I'm also not entirely thrilled with the ring of 3 mm firepolish beads in the centre. I think this time I'd have preferred opaques, possibly with a vitrail finish so they didn't look exactly like the glass pearls. But it's certainly not bad, for all that.
These are not yet listed for sale; but if you know anyone who would like them, just send them here and get them to click "Choose Options" and then "Custom". And then, in the custom text box, they either need to enter the unique identifier for this pair, which is D0020, or just type "Ukrainian" and I'll know which ones they mean. (You can have up to ten photos per listing, and I do have ten more of each style now, so they may well be going up as new listings later this week; I haven't yet quite decided whether to do that and make more reserve stock in the same three styles, or to keep what I have as reserves and finish the new design I've been working on.)
And, why, yes, there will be more arriving in pink...!
