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.

Hearts

Another thing I’ve been doing recently is heart beads. Lots of heart beads. We’re having a Valentine’s bead swap on Frit-Happens so I made a whole bunch and chose 3 of my later ones to send in. Piccies of those and what I received when I get them!

Firstly, these are made with my Carlo Dona heart press.

Champagne heart

This is Lauscha champagne, which is a very pale transparent. I used bicarbonate of soda to make the bubbles. I made this a tad too big for the press, so it’s shaped by pressing and also by hand afterwards.

Then I did these, which I am calling Mysterious Hearts of Gold.

Mysterious Hearts of Gold #1

I made the core of this with shorts in clear, yellow and green, then sprinkled some green aventurine frit, added more clear and a little pulsar, pressed it, and added raku spirals and dots to the surface. I was very pleased with the result – these hearts have a lot of depth, and the sparkle and randomness means you can spend a while staring into them. Also a great way to use up your ends of rods!

Mysterious Hearts of Gold #2

Love this one. It’s the same idea but has amber and sangre shorts and goldstone frit. Some raku stringer again, a red encased twistie one one corner and a few dots and lines of aurae.

Mysterious Hearts of Gold #3

This one… is not so good. I didn’t really think about what effect doing the core this way would have – it’s dirty martini with transparent green on top, then clear and a bit of bluestone ribbon. I have put deep twists in the ribbon in places, though they don’t show up too well here. I think the width and concentratedness of the ribbon doesn’t work as well as the frit in the other hearts, and the lime green and blue is a bit garish. I also totally messed up the surface decoration – it has terra 2 dots and a wrap at the borrom (which is showing up as reddish brown, clashingly) and some stormed supernova on one front lobe, which I left a bit raised and just serves to make the heart shape lumpy. Then my hades stringer which was an attempt to make it look more deliberate balled up on me. Not a success, and this is a cautionary tale that sometimes the kitchen sink approach just gives you unexpected fugly! Annoyingly, this one probably has the best puckered bottom end… (The shape on the second one looks good, but it tapers a little too thin for a pucker).

Something a bit different: theme of the month for February is Dots, so here’s an etched dotty heart.

Pink dotty heart

White core, dark lavender encasement, Reichenbach pink lady stripes and filling out of one lobe. White dots on the surface with pink lady on top of some of them. I made it too long for the press, but could use the lobe end to shape the top anyway. Then I etched it and I think it’s very pretty. Shame the bottom end is just slightly chipped after cleaning – getting the ends neat on these is definitely a challenge.

After the class

Triton

When these came out of the kiln, you could say that I was pleased!

Triton caterpillar over CiM mermaid (you can see a little bit of mermaid in the second pic, but not much is visible) with SiS on one end and a magic+hades twistie on the other. Look at the colours in the magic!

Triton view 2

The next one uses Ekho:

Ekho

Using Anouk’s secret recipe for hot pinks! Actually, I have no idea if that is a secret or not, but she is doing a third silver glass tutorial that will cover it. I think the wraps on the ends were multicolour dark.

Aurae

This is aurae spiralled over Reichenbach mystic pink. The wisps have more iridescence in person. The surface is triton dots and one of my triton murrini, believe it or not! I think I reduced multiple times for it to end up like this.

I haven’t quite got as good results since, from the ekho at least. But I’ve been zipping about trying out different glass, so it probably just needs a bit of attention. I like triton, it’s well-behaved!

BHB raku and MCD

This BHB is raku over opaque orange, encased and with multicolour dark on the ends. Plus my triton murrini, that were reduced and then covered in dots of clear. This has made them go a paler blue-silver. I was surprised how the raku came out! It’s unusually uniform and looks rather like standard multicolour. I do like the colour though – it’s muted but very pretty.

I also created an enormous fugly monstrosity of a lentil that has many things wrong with it, but these things happen!

At this point, my silver glass stash included triton and aurae, plus some stringers (including the Ekho) and single rods I got from Knatty Dreadz when he was still selling them. It didn’t take me very long after the class to place a nice big order with Double Helix for their seconds! (These are rods that have failed visual quality control – ie they may be slightly knobbly or curved or oval. To be honest, I can’t tell the difference with most of them, and most glass manufacturers would happily sell them as firsts. Got me some aether too – their clear, which I am yet to try).

When it comes to clear, Anouk recommends Reichenbach 1011 crystal, because it doesn’t affect the colour of the silver glass and can also be worked long and hot without ill effects. The beads above are using Effetre 006 because it’s what I had. My batch is decent, but I have noticed you can’t work it quite as hot.

Mystic pink supernova

A final thing to sign off: this is mystic pink with stormed supernova dots and clear dots. Lauscha supernova isn’t the same as Double Helix reduction colours: you don’t get an easy surface sheen by reducing it – I spent a long time and it stayed purple! It’s a very nice purple, though. However, it can be stormed. Storming is a technique by Amy Kinsch, see her tutorial Taking Reduction Glass By Storm.

A class with Anouk

Anouk visited Diana East’s studio in the UK to teach a silver glass course at the beginning of January. She’s on Flickr here and Etsy here, if you want to drool over her creations! She also sells tutorials, incidentally. My boyfriend paid for my place on the first day, which was an introduction to silver glass, as part of my Christmas present. (The other part was a biiiiig CiM order. I had a good Christmas this year! And he didn’t need to spend time stomping round shops *grin*).

I made these beads the day before the class, so these are without the benefit of her knowledge.

Lauscha blue-purple w silver

This is Lauscha blue-purple with silver leaf, reduced and encased in soft clear. Mmm, I like.

Aurae mermaid

This is CiM mermaid with a spiral of aurae, reduced, encased and pressed. I liked the result but had no idea if I’d got the right effect with the aurae!

BHB mermaid+magic

The BHB is a tuxedo base with a mermaid+magic twistie on top and encased. Not struck properly.

—–

The class was great. I went on the Friday, which was an extra date and so was quieter than the Saturday class. If you want to know about silver glass without having to waste so much getting to grips with it, try and take a class with someone who knows. It’s invaluable. I knew technically how to work striking and reducing glass, but it’s all the little things that you can’t find out otherwise. For example, I was surprised by just how long Anouk reduces for, and how long you can have a big bead out of the flame without it cracking. She also came round when we were making our beads and pointed out when we were getting them too hot (still my problem!) and when we were working it too long and things like that.

We made stonking huge focals and some test round beads, then opted to get Anouk to demonstrate all sorts of things for us rather than making more beads ourselves. It was a wonderful day, and Di’s studio is a great place to have a class.

I need a nice big crunch press! Next up, the beads I made after the class :)

New torch!

On December 21st 2010 I finally got my Minor set up! I’d bought the Minor second hand off eBay earlier in the year, and got my oxycon from Tuffnell’s in mid-September. Then I sat and made convoluted plans about how I was going to connect everything up while keeping my hothead usable if I so wished. There were various complications: apparently quick connects for 6mm ID propane hose don’t seem to exist in this country (I think Martin’s are imported – they cost more than 4x UK 8mm ones), and ones for 8mm hose, despite a heroic effort, do not fit. I was sent on a chase round the local gas, tool hire and hardware shops, but it turns out they don’t think that reducers exist to attach 6mm and 8mm hose together, and they don’t know who could crimp a new hose on to my flashback arrestor and regulator either.

I’d waited so long to put everything together to avoid the situation where I’d take my torch setup to bits and then discover that I’d be stuck without a working one. In the end, I’ve left out the quick connects for now and have my Minor attached directly to my 6mm hose. I have the rest of the bits sitting around in case I ever do find someone who can put them together for me, but this isn’t urgent anymore as I have a working torch! Poor hothead, it’s lying there with a chopped-off hose tail attached to it.

I liked my hothead a lot, but there were things that I couldn’t do on it that I wanted to. I went for a Minor because I’m familiar with them (my very first lesson was on one, and I’ve used one a couple of times since), I like how rugged they feel, and unlike many other people, I didn’t like the feel of a Cricket as much. As a bonus, mine came complete with a torch-mounted marver which I’m finding very useful.

The first thing I did was to try out some striking colours I’d only got mud from before. That’s Reichenbach 104 magic and raku (iris orange) then. I had one day playing with my Minor before I was away up North for Christmas to stay with various families. Yes, I was missing it, but I took plenty to keep me occupied! Plus my boyfriend’s mum was teaching me to crochet :)

Reichenbach magic

There are definitely colours in there! The whole bead is magic, and it’s been pressed and raked and twisted. They’re fairly muted colours, but they exist! Before I was only getting a yellow-green beige.

Magic twistie

This is a magic + hades twistie on tongue pink. This was interesting because tongue pink is also a striking colour – it goes from white to pinky-brown, and it’s rather easy to unstrike again, so I spent a while trying to get both the twistie and the background to be struck at the same time.

Raku on tuxedo

This is the one that left me grinning, though. 104 raku on CiM tuxedo. I got the whole thing white hot, let it gravity swirl a little, then pressed it. Add some additional heating and pressing. I love the colours – they look like a sunset. Or sunrise, if you prefer.

Raku rounds

These are also raku on tuxedo, but in the earthier end of the colours. It’s hard to get it hot enough on a round without losing all control over the shape, and also hard to cool it fast enough with no press involved.

Gaffer chalcedony

This here is Gaffer chalcedony over Gaffer clear, both 96CoE. Jolene very kindly gave me some to play with! It has some nice purples in it.

MCD kalera

Finally, this one makes me giggle. It’s a big ruffly lime jelly of a bead. It is transparent grass green and Reichenbach multicolour dark in a bit of an unclear tornado with the side ruffles made up of both colours. Possibly ill-advised!

Messy beads – well, one learns.

[Dec 2010]

These are all things that didn’t work for one reason or another. Around this time I started having a problem with dirty clear. I’d wipe it down before using, but was still getting nasty streaks in my beads and getting very confused about it. Had a look at my workspace in the daylight from a different angle… and saw there was still pixie dust all over the place from the mica beads! Whoops! Including on my marver, so even if my clear was clean before I started using it, as soon as I put it down or shaped it, it’d get dirty. New rule: clear up very very carefully after using any glittery bits! I thought I had cleaned up, but obviously nowhere near enough.

(I don’t have photos of most of the dirty ones – I was doing some things with black, white and clear and reticello twisties. Have to try again because I liked some of the results).

Amber stone

This one did get a bit dirty. It’s an amber base with silver foil, then triton trails added and raked a bit. Pressed, reduced and with some stripes of amber on top and the rest encased in clear. Came out huge and something of a mess, plus I lost my reduction.

Ivory and silver brown

Silver brown, my nemesis. This is the best side of this bead – all the dots are supposed to have bluey-purple in them, but the little ones are just the ambery colour of silver brown that hasn’t done anything, and the big dot is overheated.

Blue hollowish

This one is just a bit hilarious. I was trying to do a nice blue hollow on a larger (2.4mm) mandrel, but the inside collapsed, so I added a bit more glass to each end and I tried adding some aurae stringer decoration, reduced with clear on top. Messed that up again, so I have an odd bumpy bead that somewhat resembles a wonky Roman jar, and here and there on the surface it a few small pieces of aurae that have gone that bad milky overstruck colour. If I’d left it all blue it would have been an improvement! (It’s a nice blue – Effetre transparent mid blue).

There’s a common thread in all of these – silver glass problems. A big part of this was down to how I was encasing on my hot head. With normal beads, I’d put my encasing on, heat the bead all the way through while melting it in and use that to balance the shape at the end. You can’t do that with silver glass, so I was taking a very long time holding my lumpy spirally encasing far out in the flame, finding it wasn’t moving at all, eventually getting bits warm enough that I could squish them down with a marver and ending up with something that was still lumpy until I got frustrated and heated it up enough that it would go smooth, at which point it was too hot. The flame’s bushy and radiant enough that I couldn’t heat just the outside without getting much more of the bead warmed up.

I know you *can* do it properly on a hot head, I just couldn’t manage it. But I had a cunning plan! To be put into action after I had finished making all the things that needed doing before Christmas.

Afterword:
I thought I’d mention why I’m showing these beads – at the start I was blogging absolutely everything, week by week. Now I want to move towards more themed posts and testing, that I didn’t necessarily make all at once, but that fit together. I have some more bad beads that I haven’t photographed, so I think I’m going to only show bad ones if there’s something I learned from them, if they illustrate something, or if they’re just plain hilarious. Sometimes you just mess up, or use ill-advised colours and the bead isn’t interestingly wrong. So I’m not going to hold myself to showing all those. (Plus doing silver glass properly is on the agenda, and if you’ve seen one failed silver glass bead, you’ve seen most). Hopefully once I get caught up with my 2011 posts I’ll be able to keep up with myself for a while. Maybe?

Eyes and Vetro odd topaz

[Sept 2010]

Eyes around!

A little something that came out unexpectedly! It’s dark ivory, CiM sangre and Reichenbach silver brown for the dots (with clear on top). I ended up with a slit-pupil gap in the centre of each dot and I have no idea how I did it.

Vetro odd topaz

This is Vetrofond odd topaz 791989, as far as I can tell (the one with a blue centre). All just the one colour, raked and smooshed about. I seem to recall this is a colour that doesn’t take kindly to encasing, but I really like it on its own. May have to chase some down eventually, since it’s still available here and there.

Speedy beady catchup

[August 2010, inbetween the frit tests]

I’ve been hopping about a bit here – the CiM tests were in the second half of September, but I wanted to get them up sooner.

Lotus beads

I got a little carried away making lotus beads. I find them quite relaxing – dot, dot, dot, dot… Above are my first two. The cobalt is a BHB. Then there was a multicolour dark one.

MCD lotus

Then I made more! I was trying to make some little diddy ones, but they didn’t turn out quite so well. You need colours that are dense enough for the petals to stay defined, and they look better when the petals are a bit bigger.

All the lotuses

August’s Colour of the Month was 060 transparent cobalt, so here are a few more. I did some BHB practice (accidentally used light ivory instead of white on the skinny ones, so they got a bit fuzzy round the edges) and some little rounds.

Cobalt BHBs

Used some fine silver wire for the first time on one of these. Then I tidied it away and seem to have forgotten about it – should unearth it again…

Small cobalts

My persistent mostly-unsuccessful experiments with Reichenbach silver brown continue, and I got this, which I actually like! At this point I mostly got nothing out of silver brown if it wasn’t in dots, with the exception of a single odd spacer that turned purple in the kiln (I’m getting some better results now). The dots could still be better, but I like the haziness in them. The base is avocado and the little silver dots are Plowden & Thompson black.

Bumpy!

I was then out of gas for the best part of two weeks, which was very irritating!

CiM Oz and Cranberry Pink

CiM oz is an emerald green and cranberry pink is a deep reddish gold pink, CiM’s version of rubino.

CiM oz and cranberry pink

I don’t have a lot to say about oz – it’s emerald! A very nice emerald too. I have plans to do a nice big side-by-side of all my greens, but that requires a bit more organisation. Here it encases a core of CiM soylent, with white scrollwork on top and emerald over white dots.

CiM oz over soylent

I decided to do a head-to-head test of cranberry pink vs rubino, and I threw in Reichenbach gold violet as well, because I had a rod handy. As you can see, gold violet is indeed more violet. Reichenbach also has pink lady, which is less dense, and gold ruby light which is lighter and peachier.

Comparison of CiM cranberry pink, gold violet and rubino

The white in these beads is Effetre. The left bead has tri-petal flowers, cranberry pink on the left, gold violet in the centre and rubino on the right. The cranberry is darker than the rubino in small dots.

The centre bead has the colours in the same order, over a periwinkle core, with white dividing stripes and little flowers. Rubino over periwinkle is a classic combination to get purple – I prefer the shade you get from it to the one you get from the cranberry pink. The gold violet gets something much bluer.

In the right bead I left out the gold violet. White core, cranberry pink on the left and rubino on the right, with 006 clear in the centre. It wasn’t obvious until I took it off the mandrel after annealing, but the cranberry pink has cracked in three places, going along the mandrel until it hits the white, then the crack sharply changes direction and stops. This has me suspicious that it may not be thermal, especially as I have read other threads of people having problems encasing both Effetre and CiM whites with cranberry. I can’t entirely rule out thermal shock since I spent a while shaping the ends of the bead, but I haven’t seen a thermal crack that changes then stops like that. Needs more investigation.

This is a bead with cranberry pink and oz over dirty martini. Dirty martini is a very handy pale dull minty green that makes a good background for all kinds of things, including reactive colours and frits.

CiM oz, cranberry pink and dirty martini

Very final test: this is the classic colour reaction of rubino, opal yellow and periwinkle, over a black base. I decided to duplicate Jolene’s test which replaces rubino with cranberry pink and tests opal yellow against CiM stoneground.

CiM vs Effetre

The base in both cases is CiM tuxedo. The scum on the beads is either because I boiled the surface a tad, or I had some traces of silver leaf left on my marver – that’s totally my fault. The right bead is the original combination. Things to note: stoneground strikes more easily than opal yellow so is darker and less contrasting in this application. The cranberry is redder. In this case I prefer the originals, but I think taking care not to strike the stoneground too much would make them more similar. (Most of the time, stoneground’s easier striking is a very good thing). I didn’t replace the periwinkle because it’s cheap and available. The one I am using is Vetrofond.

Conclusion: cranberry pink is a deeper, redder colour than the batch of rubino I have, but is also rather more expensive. I prefer the colour of rubino for a deep pink, and also in the classic colour reaction bead. I am a bit worried by the cracking over white I got. I’ll try it again to see if it repeats. It is a beautiful colour in spacers, though.

Gold violet’s different enough from both to keep in my palette.

Lampwork: week 23-24

[Aug 1 - 8]

August’s colour of the month was 060 cobalt, and the theme of the month was Flower Power.

Here are two sangre rounds rolled in pearl mica, a lentil made of my attempt to make honey crunch (amber/topaz over ivory) over clear. And a lentil made of Vetrofond odd light red jasper.

Week 23 reddish

Gravity swirl beads: lilac, white and ink blue, 1 lentil, 2 rounds.

Lilac swirls

This was my mystery this week. I was sold the below as EDP, and thought it was because it behaved more or less as expected with periwinkle or dragonscale beads. I got the beads below out of it and boggled because they’re transparent – I’d just wound them on, kept them hot to avoid devit and straight into the kiln. Now, it turns out there was a mix-up at the vendor – they’d ordered both EDP and striped pink, only got one unlabelled and thought it was EDP. (Striped pink is EDP with a core of rubino). I still don’t know why my beads are transparent – Julie of Lush Lampwork did a lovely colour test of striped pink alongside EDP and sedona and hers comes out opaque purple…

Here’s two rounds, the rods, and a stringer I pulled.

Not EDP - striped pink

Gravity swirl beads: pale emerald, white and CiM sherwood, 3 lentils.

Emerald swirls

A big hole bead in dark turquoise and ivory.

BHB dark turquoise and ivory

A BHB in Reichenbach multicolour dark (over black) with melted in clear dots.

BHB in MCD with clear

Magdalena Ruiz multitool beads, made with the smallest cavity, in CiM poison apple. On the end is a nugget in amethyst and BeadySam’s gem surprise frit (was also encased in amethyst).

Poison apple and a fritty nugget

BHB in cobalt and white.

Cobalt and white BHB

Two beads with cobalt: one is a cobalt base with light pink and mid purple, the other is a light pink base with cobalt dots.

Cobalt and light pink

BHB in cobalt, copper green and opal yellow. The copper green reduced in the kiln, so I soaked it in grime&lime to remove that and it came out a bit odd…

BHB cobalt and copper green