Taking Craftiness to the Next Level

My mom is on the board of the Adult School, which only vaguely sounds like a school for porn, and she saw that they gave a course on glass bead making, which she signed me up for as a present (yay!). I didn't quite know what to expect, besides a room full of middle-aged women (which I got, and they were saucier than I expected, plus there was one bonus dude, and they flirted with him by making him open and lift things), but it turned out to be really fun, and a little bit scary. You start with these thin glass rods in a bunch of colors (see above) and gradually introduce them into hot, hot fire. This torch is a pretty intimidating thing--it burns at about 3500 degrees and makes a loud roaring sound. As the glass becomes molten, the rod starts to droop and before it drips into your torch head, or onto your lap, you have to wrap it around a steel rod, called a mandrel, and shape it into a bead. You'd think the shaping would be the easy part, since you just have to turn the rod and continue wrapping the glass, but after many a lop-sided attempt, I realized that it was an exact science. Lower your elbow, your bead looks like a turnip. Fail to rotate your mandrel at a steady enough speed, you get a teardrop. Let your bead cool too fast (you're supposed to let it come to room temperature in a fiberglass blanket), and it cracks off the rod leaving you with hot, sharp confetti. Speaking of which, let's talk about millefiori. Just as I had gotten comfortable with making the round beads, Leanne, my teacher (whose fingers are seen to the left making a perfect sphere), decided it was time for shapes, patterns, and other fanciness. Millefiori are little slices of glass (pictured right) with patterns in them: a flower, a star, nesting triangles, whatever. The idea is to heat your bead up and then remove it from the flame and tap it on top of a millefiori, letting the molten glass pick it up and absorb it into the bead a little bit. You then have to re-heat the bead so the millefiori melts into the surface. You can usually hear it cracking, and sometimes little chips of it will fly off and try to hurt you. Looking back, it's a miracle I didn't maim myself. Still, as chaotic and dangerous as I'm making this sound, I actually got the hang of it pretty quickly. It's very controlled danger...the flame is pointing away from you, you learn how to ease the cold glass in so it doesn't crack, and the dripping happens pretty slowly, so you usually have time to subvert impending disasters. Then, of course, I walked away with a very satisfying handful of beads and infinite bragging rights:

"Hey Cat, nice earrings!"
"Thanks, I made them myself."
"You mean you put them on a wire and attached the hooks?"
"No, you fool, I planted glass seeds, waited for them to grow into glass stalks, harvested them, then smelted them down into the very beads you see upon my earlobes. Jeez."
....Or something like that.