I have been under the weather, and ironically though I have had time to torch, I haven’t felt like it — what energy I had was taken up with getting Mr. InvestiGator settled in his new home. He is doing very well–when I checked up on his new family, they said he has behaved well and is learning new rules. Apparently having three people all playing with him has worn him out!
However, I have decided to spend some time on skills building. Specifically, I thought I would use the example of Amy Trescott’s wonderfully precise rainbow beads as an inspiration to practice dots, which sound terribly easy but which take skill and practice. (Click here to go to Amy’s website, where you can buy these wonderful beads!) 
Amy’s beads are basically stacked dots, transparent laid over white. While she has written a specific tutorial for making these beads, she also was generous enough to post her basic method on Lampwork Etc., in message #74 on this thread. (Please note that you must be a member of LE to see this thread.) I haven’t purchased the tutorial, so I worked from Amy’s directions on the LE thread, plus what I know of stacked dots.
Here’s what I got. By the way, I seem to have bunged up the settings on my camera, and keep getting too much noise in the finished picture. I’m working with it, slowly! Anyway, the first picture shows my dots in Moretti transparent. 
I need to work on my dot placement and evenness. The dots aren’t all the same size, and I am not completely covering the white base of each dot. Time to get out “Passing the Flame” and do some of Corina’s basic exercises. I don’t think I ever want to be a dot-bead person, but trying to become more precise and intentional will only help me improve my skills overall.
The second 
file is my attempt at dots with Gaffer Chalcedony, which has been described as “raku on steroids”. Forgive the passive–I don’t remember who said it! Anyway, it is one silver glass that I do plan to use a lot of. Here I tried doing stacked dots with chalcedony.
Finally, I tried buttons. Anne Ricketts has a lovely tutorial on using Jelveh’s key mandrel to make buttons. It is dead simple–the sort of thing you look at and say DUH — yet would never think up on your own! Anne does fantastic buttons. However, I made my first shanks too short, and instead of wasting the wire, thought that I could improvise with some locking haemostats. 
I have plenty of them, thanks to my sister, That Frit Girl. The advantage of haemostats is that I could make more than one button at a time, as I only have one key mandrel. The disadvantage is that they are hard to twirl evenly 
So I used a round marble mold to help me size and shape my buttons … voila.
Off to torch some more and practice.
[...] Continued here: Buttons and Dots « Four Tails Lampwork [...]