Picture 011

These are three survivors. In the black bead you can see vividly the rainbow refraction of the CZ. This is shot with available light; the flash doesn't bring out this quality as well, for some reason.

The clear bead is rather boring. If there's no dense background, you don't get as much pizazz out of the CZ. You can see the "ice crystal" effect fairly clearly.

The white bead is just plain weird. The white glass was alabastro, and it behaved very strangely; it didn't just scum when I heated it up -- it frothed. It foamed like beer suds or dish soap! I was quite surprised, never having seen glass form a light, flyaway foam before. I was going to pinch it off and start over, but then I thought what the heck, can you make a bead out of glass foam? So I gave it a try, and then rolled the "shaving cream" bead in the CZ for grins. The result is what I can only call a snowball. The bubbles pretty much drown the CZ sparkle, alas; but it didn't crack.