Hey! I wrote another tutorial! This one’s all about the Screaming Cactus Bead. The tutorial is 13 pages long with 40+ pictures describing the process from color recommendations to etching the finished bead. Since it is very picture intensive, I’ve included a “cheat sheet” that will allow you to take a good part of the tutorial with you to the torch with out having to print the whole thing. This new feature is a single sheet of paper with 16 thumbnails that sum up the most important parts of the lesson. As long as you study the tutorial carefully and make your own notes in the spaces provided, you should be able to follow along with just the sheet. A gal who purchased the fish tutorial, Georgie (aka: http://www.jawjee.com/), gave me the idea for the condensed note page. I followed up with it because I thought it was a really good suggestion.

Due to the size of this bead and the fact that I think the arms can be kind of hard to do, I am calling this bead an advanced beginner to intermediate skill level bead. However, if you are a beginner and you want to make a cactus, I believe that you could make a Screaming Barrel Cactus bead, no problem. Simply start with a shorter, rounder base and skip the arm application steps. Barrel cactus beads are super cute too. Making the face is the important thing and you can do that on either cactus. That’s the skill you’ll take away from this tutorial, I think, because you can transfer that to any bead you want.

Materials required to make this bead are minimal: You will need a graphite paddle or marver, tweezers and a utility blade mounted on an x-acto blade holder. My cacti are made from Moretti/Effetre colors with the exception of the “prickers” which are raku glass. If you like bright greens I have a specific glass list in the tutorial that I recommend you use, but if you want to try different color combinations, pretty much anything will work.

This is a 598kb PDF file that will beam to your electronic mailbox magically after you send me money. You will need Adobe Reader to open it. Please convo me if you want me to use an email address that’s different than your Paypal address. If you purchase the file during my normal waking hours, which is most of them, you should receive it right away. (Within a few hours, I would think.) Probably slower on the weekends, though.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions or need any technical support!