Beads, beads, beads...

The other night I made a ton of polymer clay beads and I spent the yesterday and the day before with photos and posting. I've got to find a more effective way to list these.  I'm doing them in the same manner I shoot and list jewelry, which is of course time consuming but the payoff of each sale makes it seem like a good time investment.  Most people do buy more than one listing of beads though.  Maybe I'll get the hang of it as I keep doing it and find ways to cut the time down.  

Sunset faceted bead

Part of the problem--a big part--has to do with my photo/listing burnout.  I'm in this funk where I choose like 40 photos of each item and then can't decide on picky little details, so I end up preparing literally like 20 photos to be listed.  Obviously that right there shows I am taking 4 times longer than I should be since I can only use 5 of them--and honestly, with something like these beads I may not even need all 5 photos.

 These above have sold.  I organized my polymer clay stuff and found a little bowl of some molds I made a long time ago that I'd totally forgotten about.  These have a texture from a mold made from old lace.  I like the webbing idea.

 These above are from button molds.

 And these above are from the same button mold but here they reminded me very much of a reptile pattern.

 Above are some shaded white-to-grey faceted with gloss coating.

 Rose bead molded...

 The reptile button mold and floral domes--these sold too.

 Pastel reptile cones...

 Florals...

 Some more crackled beads with an iridescent lavender...

Some faceted with aluminum foil inclusions.  After seeing how this process worked, I got a lot of ideas about how to make some fresh new faceted things.

 Another reptile set...

 More florals...

These above are my favorites out of everything I made that night.  I've been meaning to see if I could make some fairly realistic looking rock type beads, and it was really fun.  I plopped the freshly baked white beads into a watery brown acrylic paint bath, then evened out the paint a bit with a brush, then added some black splotches.  It was really weird how the polymer responded to the paint.  I'd apply the paint, and it would disappear totally, then kind of appear again all at once like magic.  Can't even describe it because I don't really get what it was doing or why.  I think the bead just absorbed the paint because it was still quite soaked with the watery paint bath, and then spewed it out all at once.  It was weird!  But the result was kind of fractal and just exactly what they needed, I think.  I tried for some organic-looking and subtle veiny surface texture by using the lines of my palm and fingerprints.  One lot of them has sold, but there's another still up.  I'll be making some tinier ones soon, too.

 Another pair of these wrapped guys.  The beads are the "matching" last pair of the air dry pottery clay with the liquid polymer/acrylic paint "glaze."

 I just love that green.  (I really hope that's green.  It's green, right?)

These above have some painted teardrop polymer clay beads.  I was going for a super faux, stylized turquoise kind of thing--the way some 50s plastic faux stones have a kind of obvious, Flintstones-y look to them.  Again these are just plain white bead bases with acrylic paint, glitter, and the Sculpey gloss coating.  The gloss really changes the whole look of a bead.  Beads, beads, beads.....

Bead Addendum:

 These above sold, along with the matte ones at the bottom, but they've got a new black vein matrix paint technique and pre-bake carving that was super fun to mess with, so I will be offering lots of more this type in the very near future.