Saturday, September 19, 2020

It's Glowing To Be a Good Time

 I've been working on a new thing with my pieces. Black light reactive beadwork!

For a bit of a back track, I must first tell how this idea came about. Immediately after graduating from college, circa late 2011-early 2012, I had picked up a second job at an indoor glow in the dark putt-putt place in my local mall. It was a low effort and somewhat slow job. After tiring of the selection of books I had to read, I decided to bring small projects to work on and make utilizing the small desk light by the register.

Lo and behold I learned that some of my beads glowed under the overhead black lights in the room! This opened up quite a few possibilities for me. Unfortunately I do not have photographs of those early pieces, but I have purchased new lights for my home and oh boy, do some of my pieces glow! 

My reversible King of All Cosmos/Robo King loom woven bracelet is one such piece:

It's available here for purchase here:

As far as other pieces go, I have recently completed this intentionally designed glow flower necklace, the entirety of which I streamed live on Twitch:

This piece was such a blast to make! To watch me make similar works in future, please do consider following me at www.twitch.tv/vanishingpearl. It is also the first piece that I made for the express purpose of glowing under the black light. One day I hope to have a body of work to display in such a setting. This is a great start!

How can I source my own glow beads, you ask? Easy! Just search for beads that have either neon or luminous in the title or description when ordering. Or go through what you already have on hand. You'd be surprised what materials light up. Occasionally color lined and ceylon finishes also glow. Oddly enough, white does not unless it's acrylic. But a variety of my compressed felts do, as well as some coiled French wire/bouillon. These will all be interesting to experiment with in future. I'll leave you with comparison images of a recent purchase:


Happy beading! I hope this post was informative. Let me know if you make any black light discoveries of your own.

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