Creating Glass Beads by Jeri L Warhaftig

Book Title: Creating Glass Beads
Subtitle: A new workshop to expand your beginner skills and develop your artistic voice
Author: Jeri L Warhaftig
Genre: Crafts, Design, Glass
ISBN: 978-1-60059-582-0
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
Suggested Retail Price: $24.95

Join Jeri Warhaftig in her new glass bead workshop, designed for ambitious beginners and those with more experience to move past the basics and refine an individual style of work.  She has developed 10 step-by-step, illustrated sessions, each focusing on a single project bead designed to teach specific materials, tools, and methods.
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Creating Glass Beads is a wonderful resource for those interested in the art of crafting glass beads.  It introduces you to the artist and her studio as well as her background and eduction.   She also explains how she has worked with bead makers to serve as project testers.  The author explains about the basics involved in this craft including basic hand tools like mandrels, bead release, tweezers, a knife, marvers, glass cutters, parallel mashers and pick.  She also discusses torches, glass  and various work stations.  The topics of annealing, safety and studio set up are also reviewed.

The book is broken down into ten lessons or projects.  Each project includes information on its purpose, necessary materials and tools, notes and step by step instructions with photographs for each step of the project.   There are also workshop wisdom boxes with helpful tips and information that apply to each project. The projects included are Ruffled Pendant, Cheery Little Guy, Eye Bead, Cosmic Bead, Mirrored Rainbow Hollow, Cane Beads, Silver Butterfly, Glass Memento, Glass Portal, and End of Day Bead.  Also included are appendices on mirroring with silver, working with resin, near misses and the project testers.    Each project also includes a beautiful gallery of photographs of finished beads.

This is an amazing reference book for anyone looking to expand their skills in making glass beads. The steps are very easy to follow but the skills required are more than a total novice would have.  I love that each project tells you exactly what supplies and tools are necessary so there is no guessing about what would work best with each material and task. There's a wide range of different projects included including pendants and individual beads.  I absolutely love the section on Cheery Little Guy that shows you how to make all sorts of cute beads with faces.  If you're interested in expanding your skills in bead making, you really need to check this book out.

My thanks to the sponsor for allowing me to review this book.

As required by the FTC: I received a product sample in order to write my review.  I received no monetary compensation.  All opinions expressed are mine and mine alone.