Yesterday went fairly well. I didn't feel like it was working, while I was at the torch, but I ended with a dot bead I'm very happy with, so all in all it felt good. I did a couple of miscellaneous playing around beads, some colour combination testing (didn't work out well with the stringer work, but that was just practice and I'm happy with the colours), a couple of hollows, some CZ beads (one of which is cracking) and my dot bead. I intended it to be raku stringer on black, just a tester for working with the raku, and played a bit with making a tube, then abandoned fixing the ends and started making dots. The first few just felt so right that I kept adding more rows of four dots - staggered - and in the end I think it is going into the "Anneal" bin despite the wonky ends.
