Twisties

I’ve been playing a little with some silver glass twisties too. Trial and error, because it’s hard to know what’s what with something where the end result depends on what glass you used in the twistie, how you constructed it (base vs stripes vs encasing), what bead base you put it on, and how you treat it after it’s on the bead! I mentioned before that my twistie with red roof tile and hades in it didn’t turn out as intended because those two glasses swamped the stripes of silver glass.

Couple of silver glass twisties

They looked pretty before I used them, at least!

The redder looking one is CiM stoneground with stripes of kalypso, psyche, terra 2 and aurae. Lord knows what the best way to treat that would be! I put clear on the end for the pull, so I also have some thin end pieces that have clear twisted into them too. Which can be fun.

The grey-green one is CiM canyon de chelly with stripes of Lauscha olive and ekho.

Twisties on ivory

This bead is ivory with the aforementioned RRT twistie on one side and a thin end piece of the stoneground twistie on the other. With twists and clear dots. I reduced it a bit. Ivory probably isn’t a great choice of background colour to be doing this on in the first place…

Dragon's egg

This was from before: also the RRT twistie. Ivory, silver leaf, twistie, reduced and encased. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but it’s rather nice in an organic way. I’m calling it a dragon’s egg.

Opalino twistie

This is the stoneground twistie on a white opalino base. Reduced and it has a lot of shine and fuming.

RRT tube with twistie

In this case, the base bead was red roof tile, and it has the olive twistie on top. It’s interesting and again organic but more subtle this time. Probably still not the best base to show off the twistie on.

Dots

February’s theme of the month was dots! I mentioned it when I showed my pink dotty heart a couple of posts down, but here’s the rest of what I made.

Psyche and opalino dotties

These are psyche dots on nile green opalino and white opalino. You can see that the silver glass has fumed the white and has also affected the colour of the green.

Dotty BHBs

These big hole beads have dots in periwinkle, rubino and opal yellow. The bead on the right has a base of tongue pink (half struck) and the other two have a base of CiM plum unique-3, which is much paler than normal plum. You can see it’s formed darker separation lines under the dots.

Adamantium BHBs

These BHBs are CiM admantium with dirty martini and mermaid dots. They spread so I didn’t get crisp edges on these.

Marmalade set

These beads have shards made from Lauscha brown/white layered rods on a white background. I was thinking the layers would show up over the white, forgetting that the layers *are* white and so don’t look different at all! They were visible in the shards before I applied them, though :p
Next time I try it over clear.

I do like the effect – they’re marmaladey and I added Kaz murrini and opaque light red dots.

Terra 2 BHB

A BHB in black with terra 2 dots topped with clear. There’s more iridescence in person.

Off-mandrel hearts

Serendipitously, Holly of Holly’s Folly Glass posted this off-mandrel heart tutorial and I thought “Ooh, that looks interesting” so I went off to have a go.

First off-mandrel heart

First try! I used a thick rod of transparent pale blue for the base and added twistie ends in neutral and green. I twisted the centres, shaped the heart end and added a loop in baby blue (tricky!). Then I held the heart in my reverse-action tweezers, not the loop, in case it might shock. I took off the rod and heated the end to round off, then tried to put the heart into my kiln… but the tweezers wouldn’t let go! So I stuck it in my annealing bubbles to cool down. My tweezers have very thin pointy ends, and one of them had got embedded in the glass. I hadn’t put them in the flame, but I most have got them too hot anyway because it was well and truly stuck. In the end I just bent off the tweezers, so now one of the points is shorter than the other, and the remains are still in this bead… After this, I used my needlenose pliers instead and always hold the loop!

I made heart 2 (the blue one below) in the same way, without the mishap. Then I read Mr Smiley’s heart tutorial (there are pics later on in the thread) and I made more… and more. They’re fun and rather addictive, but I still find the loops tricky!

Blue and pink off-mandrel hearts

Blue heart: pale blue with a blue twistie and a green+brown twistie.
Pink heart: Reichenbach mystic pink mixed about with Lauscha soft clear. Goldstone ribbon on the surface and encased. The shape has a bit too much on one side for my liking.

Citrine twistie heart

This heart is Lauscha citrine with my red roof tile twistie. There were a couple in between the pink heart and this one, but they’re off to the Valentine’s swap so I won’t show them yet. The RRT twistie hasn’t been a great success – basically it may as well be RRT and hades only, because those are the colours that take over.

Opalino raku heart

I really like this one. It’s a white opalino base with coe 96 raku frit. I didn’t strike the frit properly, though I did get the opalino hot enough that it’s started displaying faint black spiderwebbing in places. Neither of which I mind – I think it gives it a delicate look, and the muted colours go well with it.

CiM crocus, pink champagne, peacock and chalcedony

CiM has some lovely opalino colours, which are much better behaved than Effetre’s opalinos. Here are some spacers in a few of them (plus pink champagne).

CiM crocus is a light opalino purple that keeps its translucency. Lovely, and there’s nothing like it from other manufacturers. Pink champagne is a pretty transparent pink.

CiM crocus and pink champagne

Here’s CiM chalcedony – an opalino light blue. Less translucent than crocus and tends to opacify if you work it for a long time. I also found it tricky to photograph – it should be slightly more translucent than it appears here.

CiM chalcedony

This last is CiM peacock with cobalt trails, encased in clear and with Kaz’s multicolour mermaid murrini and MCD dots. Peacock is a gorgeous very translucent green opalino. I made a necklace with beads that show the colour more obviously and I’ll put that up when I can.

CiM peacock with MCD

Incidentally, these are two separate blue frits over crocus. I was going for less coverage but they spread out a lot! You can see the translucency of the base gives them a glow, though.

Crocus with blue frits

Lampwork – newbie week 6

March 29 – April 4

CiM colour tests

CiM spacers

This week I started with a treat and got out my CiM sample pack. Spacers above of most of them. I haven’t done Peace, Hades, Stoneground, Canyon de Chelly or Khaki – Peace because it is white, Hades because it is an intense black and a spacer would be a waste, and the last three so far because they work best as reactive bases for other things (also because they are expensive and I only have very skinny rods of the first two!). I might reconsider that, though. I already know I really like Stoneground from a little bit added to a more recent bead.

It’s nice glass to melt – I was particularly impressed by the transparents. Pulsar and Clockwork felt lovely. I’ve noticed that a lot of the opaques got much darker round the mandrel – particularly noticeable on Thai Orchid, Glacier and Celadon.

For some reason, I’m still finding it rather difficult to take pictures of red and purple beads and get the colours right if there are other colours in the picture too. Possibly a combination of my camera settings and jpeg compression. The reds come out hugely saturated and darker than they should be. The picture should be reasonably accurate (by my monitor at least!) but the purples should still be a bit lighter. Oh, and Lipstick varies depending on the type of lighting – it’s brownish there but much redder in sunlight or halogens.

Opalinos and turquoise

Week 6 beads

I bought up someone else’s stash of opalinos – it seemed like a good opportunity to try them out! The UK suppliers don’t tend to carry them and they’re one of the things newbies get warned off because they aren’t always strictly compatible with other colours and burn easily. I really liked them – didn’t have a problem with them getting too hot on my hothead and I was careful but they didn’t seem to be shocky. And I love the results! Here we have nile green, periwinkle and carnelian opalinos. The transparent baby blue bead was me trying carnelian opalino stringer on it – not very noticeable! Then I did some dark turquoise beads with black stringer design.

Faux boro

Faux boro 1

I started doing some experiments with this – it’s the straw yellow plus iris gold frit version. The first pic is just that, wound directly on from the rod and encased in clear. The blues are fairly dark and the whole thing has a slight cola overtone in some lights, particularly noticeable along the mandrel. I think this might have something to do with straw yellow being machinemade now – certainly I’ve seen people saying that the current available batches aren’t as good as older ones.

Faux boro 2

The second is straw yellow with iris gold frit, pulled into stringer and wrapped over a tube of clear then encased. I was wondering if that would give less cola colour. Not so much! You can see blues from some angles, but not in this photo :p

I did a couple more experiments with it this week too – should be in next week’s post!

Flamingo

Flamingo beads

I really like these. Light grey transparent core, which I handshaped into ovals, then added diagonal stringer lines in black, anise white and carnelian opalino. Melted in, gravity swirled, reshaped and then mashed flat. Pretty!