Bowls to Noodle Over

Sometimes beads just pop in my head as I'm already making something else. And I take a hard right turn from my original intent. Does that happen to you?

Let me tell you the story about this Noodle Bowl bead.

You see, the original intent was to see if I could make breakfast cereal in a round bowl. I made the periwinkle base bead and decorated it with some fun purple striped stringer. (Look at my listing for a better view of that) And then I had some striped and cased stringer for the cereal. If you look inside this bowl, it didn't end up looking like cereal, but it did look like noodle soup.

So I built up the sides of the bowl and decided that if the bowl was more square, it would look more modern and perhaps Asian in appearance. So that came next and don't forget to use your brass tools to help pull out the corners of it to square it up more easily.

I thought it needed something else to "show" what the bead was, so I had a hare-brained idea to try to make chopsticks to lay across the top of the bowl. As you can see, this one needs more practice. This was my original stringer used for the cereal/noodles and it's pretty small. I was trying to lay it down between two connection points on the top of the bowl to give it the diagonal look. Let me just say, it's really hard to do. If it were to lay across a solid surface, that would have been a lot easier and as you can tell, the chopsticks must have been made out of Curly Ash Wood, instead of Oak.

I tried slightly heating to straighten them, but the heat just made it want to sink into the bowl, instead of being nudged into place. I think this would be easier with a stiffer glass (this has an ivory base)- and using boro would have been a piece of cake.

If I were doing it again, I would make stringer with a stiffer glass core that would hold it more in place- like a transparent dark brown and then case it in the opaque glass, so it would still appear as lighter wood.

I had a blast making this bead and thought I'd share the 90 degree right turn as well as some of the lessons I learned while making it. It's funny, in spite of having wobbly chopsticks, I really like this one. and think it would make a cute pendant. The breakfast cereal will be attempted again, on another day.