Creative Slump III

I continued with Gwacie's assignments, and have dragged a couple of others into playing with me on The Glass Haven. Here's the newest pictures:

Gwacie's assignments were these: Make the longest tube bead you have ever made, make the bead with the most colors you have ever used on a single bead, and make the teeniest weeniest decorated bead you have ever made. Well, I figured that the long tube bead would be good for using up the shorts that inevitably collect when I'm done with a color. When I am going to keep using it I fuse the short to the next rod, but at the end of a set I can get lazy. So I wound a bunch of complementary colors at random on the mandrel, and added stringer in whatever color I grabbed first. The bead's a skosh over 2.5" long, which isn't the longest bead I have ever seen, but is either the longest or one of the longest I have ever made. It's as long as my longest bead release dipping lid, for sure.

Then I went for the weeniest bead. It is hard using a normal-sized rod to get a teeny tiny footprint on the mandrel, but with care I managed it.
Then I rounded the bead, which is surprisingly harder than it sounds when you have such a small amount of glass on the mandrel, and added dots. They're alternating, and are a bit cockeyed. I need to try this again! But I got a 2mm wide bead out of the exercise, which I thought was pretty tiny.

Finally, a bead with the most colors I have ever used. Id on't know if the dense white frit counts as a color, or the black base for that matter. For the rest, I just grabbed all my excess stringers and started striping. I have to say that I liked the bleed effect so much that I made a set in the same design! It should go up on ETSY tomorrow.



Meanwhile, it's my turn to come up with challenges for the ongoing SLump Game. I've got until Friday, though.

Creative Slump II: Side Trip down New Glass Lane

Saturday was the first meeting of the Southern Flames lampworking group that I have been able to attend for a while. Meetings are most often on Wednesday nights, and very often I am teaching on Wednesday evenings.

It was a fun meeting. During the meeting, we had a new visitor--Brad Shute of Striking Color. He brought samples of his new silver glass, and offered his odds and short ends at a very reduced price. They looked lovely! I decided to try it, but, as I have had mixed success with the silver glasses, I thought I would invest in only a quarter pound.

After the meeting, Marcy Lamberson (StudioMarcy) and I were the only two who took him up on his offer. We walked out into the chilly night, over to the back of Brad's truck. He pulled out a scale, and three cardboard boxes full of short ends. We began making silly jokes about getting our glass "Crack," complete with parking-lot dealers and careful scales. I should say that

Brad was very generous in his reading of quarter pounds and pounds -- he gave me more like half a pound of glass. Marcy bought a pound, and her total was likewise a good bit over her specified amount. We all shook hands, made more jokes about midnight goods handovers, and headed out to our respective ways. I went to the last part of the Open Studio night at Duckbill Studios, and Marcy went home.

Well, I got to try the glass on Sunday, which distracted me from Gwacie's assignments. I have had hit-or-miss results with many silver glasses, and in general find that *for me* they aren't worth the price. I do well with Taxco and Rocio Silver Mist, but the new Terra and other glasses just never work as well for me as they do for many others--it's purely my technique. So I approached Brad's glass with a combination of determination and trepidation! I didn't have much torch time, but I made a wanna-be barrel and some sprees.

The barrel, alas, broke through the bead release before I finished shaping it, and appears to be permanently fused to the mandrel. This is the one bad thing about middle-dipped mandrels, IMHO; one's occasional plant stakes are much shorter. But the silver glass produced absolutely beautiful colors with almost no fuss.
The glass does not like to be encased, I found, at least not with Diamond Clear. It's technically COE 104, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is compatible with all 104 glasses. You can see the cracks in the spree beads, feh and double feh. So: no or only very light encasing, where the ratio of clear to base is smaller. The barrel is encased, too, but there were no cracks because the clear was less of a percentage of the whole bead.

So that took up my torching time on Sunday, and is bringing back some of my enthusiasm. Brad's glass gets a solid thumbs-up sign from me, as well. I am teaching Monday and Tuesday, and Wednesday I want to go vote (IF YOU CAN, GO VOTE EARLY. THIS IS AN HISTORIC ELECTION NO MATTER WHO YOU BACK--PLEASE PARTICIPATE!). Friday, though ... time to work on assignments and custom orders, and maybe some more of Brad's silver glass.