Peonie beads don’t shrink much.
The peonie beads turned out great. I gave them to my daughter to polish. I might take them back and see if I could polish them myself. I ended up adding some mexican cinnamon to them. I think next time I do that I’ll use a coffee grinder and grind the cinnamon before adding that to the clay mixture. The truth is that at the beginning of the experiment the first chopped leaves smelt like green would smell if a color could have a smell. Then it went downhill fast. When we were using the rose petals to make beads, they always smelled like roses. Peonies ended up smelling like green with a huge hint of peanut butter with a touch of vinegar. I still can’t make up my mind if that is a good smell or not. Not being able to decide if I liked the smell, I added some chopped mexican cinnamon. I then put the entire mixture in some cheesecloth and strained the clay through that. Then two or three times a day for the next couple of days I’d run the cheesecloth covered bundle under running water. Now the beads smell pretty good. I think once they are polished they are going to be great beads with a nice hint of cinnamon.
Dried Rose petal bead. Starting shape was the size of a quarter.
The smells were not the only differences between the rose petal beads and the peonie beads. The rose petal beads lost half their size in the drying stage. The rose petal beads would start off the size of a quarter and end up the size of a dime. The peonie beads, on the other hand, ended up being the size of a nickel. I think that is because peonies have bulkier petals. The colors changed at the same rate though. The rose petals started off a moderate red and became a very dark brown, almost black, by the time they were beads. The peonie beads started off a light pink and turned into a light coffee brown when they dried. I hope next year I can try the experiment again and see if I can make the process better. Now that both sets of beads are dried out we go the next stage and polish them.
Peonie beads at the start of the drying process.
Polishing the beads, to me, means smoothing them out a bit. My daughter talks about sanding them down but another experiment that I am thinking of trying is putting a couple of beads in a pill bottle with some sand and shaking it a lot to see if that will smooth them down. That is how rock tumblers work: you put sand and some other fine material in a tumbler with the rocks that you want smoothed out and rotate. It might be quicker to hand sand them. Another option would be to hook a small bottle to the spokes of the bike and ride a lot. The friction would be good but I don’t think there is enough space between the bike wheel and the crank case to allow a pill bottle to pass unhindered. Hmm…., a car wheel might work though.
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