Clear Encasing & Silver

I decided to try a Cosmic Swirl bead.  It had several challenging ‘firsts’ for me and if the design turned out well,. to top it off I could attempt to encase it with clear,. hopefully without any carbon scum coating. *crossing fingers*

A first time using silver leaf in my studio, that was kinda cool. The first time stacking dots in such a way and combining colours like this.  The design did turn out beautifully and then I was faced with the scary decision to encase (having never done it successfully before on a bead so large) and possibly ruin a perfectly good bead. Oh what the heck,..it’s only glass right?,lol.

Well the encasing went like a dream,.. I am so thrilled with it,..took forever though, and I think this bead took me about 35mins to make,lol. It is about 1″ in size.

It survived the vermiculite without cracking,.albeit suffering a few pock marks on the surface from putting it in too early *note to self,..bigger beads need a second or two longer to firm up the skin before putting in the vermiculite,…. I was able to snap this photo and two hours later I took my bead out of my purse to show a friend and heard a ‘tink’ sound and felt between my fingers a little explosive energy ;}…..Awesome!,. now I have two cabochons,lol

As luck would have it,. it broke in the best possible way,. with both sides showing off main features beautifully.  I need to keep these as they are for a while because they look really awesome like this and I can see their gizzards. Once I am ‘over it’ perhaps after a few more cracks (which I’ll avoid once I’m able to pop beads straight from torch to kiln), I’m thinking I might just slump these and turn them into real cabochons (without mandrel holes). I think they would look fantastic wrapped in Sterling Silver.

Intense Black and a fun shape

Today I decided to play with ‘intense black’. This stuff is awesome,. and I bought a heap of it because I love the lacey webbing effect it has. Made all five beads in one session at the torch because I was on a roll

Usually 3 beads at a time is my limit because I find lampworking very tiring,.. I seem to get mezmerized or something by the flame and my eyes get very heavy(the same way they do whenever I try to read anything),…don’t want to nod off and burn my nose.

Anyway,.. have a look at the webbing on the top area of the 4th bead along. This is a good example of what intense black does.

I also really played with the torch during these,.altering the amounts of NG and Oxygen to acheive colour reations where I wanted them. An example is the middle bead where the turquoise and red is at the top. The turquoise/red section is actually one turquoise rod,. only part of it was hit with a reducing flame to cause the copper to come to the surface.

Too much fun was had in one evening me thinks :).

Clear Encasing & Florals

Ok,. today was another attempt to encase in clear without cooking the clear and turning it into a carbon filled grey scum layer over the beads.

The first bead was a warmup bead,lol. It is an implosion bead. This bead went through a process of almost turning itself inside-out to get the look of this flower. Love doing these.

The second bead is actually my second attempt at a plunged dot floral. Both of these beads are 16mm and the clear stayed nice and clear. No carbon scum here yaaay!

The orange petal floral was my first attempt at a plunged dot floral. I have not read any instructions how to do these yet and did these the way I thought they were made. This bead is a whopper at 1″ and covered in a carbon scum from letting the clear heat up too much. Oh well,lol.  The white petalled bead is my third attempt at a plunged dot floral and is supposed to be slightly pinkish since the white petals were covered in transparent amethyst. Unfortunately this bead also suffered a roasting,lol and is also covered in a carbon scum layer. The petals looks rather grey in real like *snif*. 

Soooooh it seems that I can avoid cooking the clear when doing small beads,.. but large beads I just cook ‘em. It seems my options are,.. melt mid-flame and get carbon scum,.. melt high in flame and die of old age while waiting for the glass to form it’s nice round shape.  I think I will try again after reading some instructions first, and try and figure out the clear trick.  Clear and I,… we just don’t get along :} .