Can it be...?? Getting Ready for Valentine's Day Already..?

Can it be...? I was thinking the other day that I really need to start to get ready for Valentine's Day. Of course, I do have a time crunch. I will be out of commission for about a week at the end of the month. I have to have surgery on my wrist and won't be making jewelry for a couple of weeks...what ever am I going to do..??? Probably go stir crazy....lol...! Hence the early start to the Holiday.
These little beauties will be available in my Artfire studio very shortly. Perfect for Valentine's Day.

Experiments in Pearl Dyeing

I have been playing with dye the last couple of days. One of my groups posted a link to a video about using RIT dye to color glass pearls. I just knew I wanted to try it. They have a custom color chart that is too dye for ( get it? to dye for.. sorry, couldn't resist).

I made really luscious colors of coral, marine blue, aqua blue ( got darker than I wanted) and caramel. I love how the chocolate brown pearls turned out...!

In my first experiments I cut the glass pearls off the plastic string they come on and used cheese cloth to dip them, then I got smart and left them on the string and used a bead stopper to keep the pearls I didn't want to dye away. That was a much better technique.

I did try to dye a couple of cheap freshwater pearls I had laying around....and strangely enough, they didn't dye, I don't what kind of dye is used on freshwater pearls. Not that I think Pearl farmers use RIT dye. Fire Mountain Gems also has a tutorial for dyeing freshwater pearls. I am guessing I just didn't leave them long enough.

If you'd like to try to make custom colors for your jewelry, this is something you should try. I ended up dipping my pearls for about a minute to get some intense colors, but you can play and get the depth that you would like. I can't wait to get some more glass pearls to play with. Check out the video link and see for yourself how easy it can be...!