Crackling stone beads and glass pebbles

As usual I was online googling something from my bead blog when I stumbled over something else. That time it was FireNFusion's How to Make Fried Marble Necklaces (in the oven), that caught my eye. After reading that I felt like trying to find some of my old glass marbles, but failing that I had to use the second best, glass pebbles originally intended for flower arrangement but also useful to make beaded bezels for.

(Bead in the middle not crackled, used as reference.)

Then I began thinking of crackled quartz, glass beads and fired agate so I got out a few beads I felt I could afford to lose (the process is rather tough, not all beads survive and some don't crackle "the right way". My czech glass beads and glass mosaic didn't crackle at all. In the end, they got a few miniscule cracks -- which broke the bead when I put pressure on it. Too hard or well annealed perhaps? But I got some nice crackling on my "smoke" quartz (which lost its colour) and the agates. The somewhat opaque rose quartz did crackle, but the lines don't show up very well.


I know this is bead torture, but it's really fun. And I haven't broken that many of the sacrificed beads yet.

PS! Crackling means making actual cracks in the beads. It can make them very prone to breakage sometimes.