Beads of Courage: Butterfly Beads

Marcy Lamberson has blogged about Robert Simmons' new take on butterfly beads using white enamel and copper leaf. Robert's beads are the top picture. He's the National Director for Bead Donations for the Beads of Courage program. He also is a wonderful person and an excellent teacher--only Robert could tell a group of lampworkers about the chemical composition of etching fluid, and its dangers (this stuff can eat down to the bone!), and have all of us raring to go out and etch some more ... carefully.

Butterfly beads are given to parents whose children didn't survive their illness. The problem with many sculptural butterfly beads is that, while they are beautiful, they can also be delicate.
Unless the wings are carefully attached, they are likely to chip or snap off. It's not a problem if the parents want to display the bead, but many want to wear it and keep it close.

Robert has made an excellent tutorial on making these beads; you can see pictures at the Southern Flames website.

The second and third pictures are of both sides of my first butterfly bead. I rather pretentiously named it "From Bonds Arising," and added copper mesh to signify the prison fence of the body that the child has escaped. The bead can be wired so that it can be worn as a pendant.


If you do not want to use enamels, I have found that adding copper leaf over a dot of Opal Yellow will give a lovely green color, as seen in these beads from last year. I think if you add a dot of Opal Yellow where you want your butterfly to be that you can achieve a similar look. If you want to use fine 40 or 42 gauge copper sheeting, the butterfly will turn a lovely shade of pink if you use it over Reichenbach frits in the pink and red family, as seen in this focal (it's a dragonfly, so just imagine it as a butterfly, k?).

Robert's tutorial (and my tips) are freely offered to the lampworking community. Please consider making--and donating--some of these butterfly beads to Beads of Courage.

Random Musings about Experiments

The last Southern Flames meeting featured a presentation by Margie Deeb and Kristy Nijenkamp on color theory and color mixing. I had some time to torch today, and I played with color mixing, with varied success (it was my first time!) And that got me thinking ... always dangerous.

When you're mixing colors you're using some of the same skills you need to build complex glass cane or twisties, and you're using some of the techniques. Some people build a cane using a flat lollipop-shape of glass as a base, whereas others use a cone or a barrel shape. Some people build cane right on the parent rod, whereas others use borosilicate or Moretti clear rods as punties, with or without a maria on the end. Others prefer stainless steel chopsticks. For simple canes or twisties, the method generally doesn't matter. Whatever works for you is what you should do.

As I was mixing colors, however, I began to think about what differentiated techniques, and--by extension--what differentiated beadmakers. Why did some people become teachers and others not? Why do some people write wonderful techniques books and others not? Why do some people improve steadily in their art and others stay at hte same level? Obviously, talent, time to work, inclination, and many other variables all play a role. But I think the habit of analytical reflection is also part of the process. I make my history students tell me the argument of the text they are reading, because if they can articulate it, they own it. I make myself do the same thing when I am reading. If I just understand something non-verbally, chances are I don't really understand it clearly enough to use it. And I find the same thing happens when I'm torching.

As I was mixing, I was thinking about the ways Kristy--and Drew Fritts--suggested holding the stainless steel chopsticks. While I could see the benefit in that method, I found that, for me, a style more closely rooted in knitting worked better and gave me better results. I could see why, because of the twisting action my hands were making, but I could also see the downside, namely more glass on the chopstick. As I worked around that obstacle (letting the glass on the chopstick stay hot while letting the glass on the other cool down enough that I could swipe most of the glass from the first chopstick onto the larger mass of glass), I considered twistie techniques, and realized that I could say when I would prefer to use a maria rather than a chopstick (a large gather with stripes I wanted to keep even), when I would use a boro maria (I want a clean break at the end), when I would use a cone (I'm using chopsticks and don't want "bones" at each end), when I would use chopsticks (Most cases, but especially using up shorts), and the like.

What it does is help me do what I want to do with glass more mindfully when I consciously, rather than *only* intuitively, know how to achieve the look I want in glass. And I think that may be one of the things that separates the writer, the teacher, the learner from those who stay still--the habit of conscious analysis.

Sometimes it IS the tools

We've all heard the saying that it's a poor workman who blames his tools. In general, that's right. The best tools in the world won't turn a shoddy craftsperson into a good one, and someone with superb skills can often turn out the most amazing work despite poor or makeshift tools.

But sometimes you reach the limit of the tool you have. That's happened to two friends of mine this month. Tinroof couldn't get the lighting on her photos right, though she tried different lighting, white balance squares, and the like. A better light tent solved the problem. Art of the Firebird was having trouble with photography. No matter what she did, her pictures didn't improve. She spent a lot of time looking at camera angles, white balance, staging, focus, and the like. Finally, she got a camera with a better macro lens, and all that practice paid off in instantaneously better photos.

Does the better tool pay off because of the investment in skill that preceded its acquisition? I think so, when that's the case. I can usually get excellent color out of Iris Orange glass, aka raku. But I spent months trying to coax colour out of raku on a Hot Head torch, and I think all that effort paid off when I got a torch that could actually have an oxidizing flame.

New Technique: Tornado Beads

Over the weekend I tried a new technique--the tornado bead. There's an excellent tutorial on them by Margaret Zinser, and I have wanted to try them! A fellow team member, Elysium Beads, has a beautiful tornado bead example on ETSY, reproduced here as the first picture, and her bead gave me the necessary boost.

Meanwhile, as I wrote earlier, I was frit-testing one of my sister's unique frit blends. So I decided to use it as the base of my first tornado bead. It turned out very well indeed --- except that I was so caught up in the process of making the bead and keeping the base cool that I forgot the cardinal rule of lampworking larger pieces: insurance heat. Yep, the bead cracked right along the mandrel line. In the picture you see I've glued it.

But I really like that frit! I don't know if it has a problem with encasing, because the two beads I have made with it and encased have both cracked. Every other tornado bead I made in that session cracked, though, so I don't think there's enough evidence that the frit is at fault. I made a tornado bead yesterday that I heated more thoroughly, and that was fine. So I will try again, making some round encased beads and a new tornado bead; if THOSE crack, then it's the frit, alas. Encasing brings out such lovely colors in it, though.

Pulling Rainbow Cane

This weekend my friend J and I took a class at Flame Tree Glass on pulling rainbow cane. As we were the only students, Lance went ahead and gave us a good solid review of latticino in general, which was really good--I pull it all the time, but I really had no clue as to the theory of it. After this class I am a lot more able to get the precise results I want, rather than guessing what will happen if I put the glass in different spots.

What is latticino? It's a thin rod of glass that has a white (italian latte, milk) or clear base, and colored threads spiraling down the rod. Each color lasts for the full length of the latticino cane. Rainbow cane, however, is different. The color starts at one end and slowly goes through a short section of each color, each one blending slowly into the next. Here are some examples from class. We pulled a monster cane that was truly a rainbow, with colors from purple to red, and these images are the two parts of various canes:





To make any cane, first you melt the end of a long rod of white or clear. You can press it into a paddle shape or roll it into a cylinder that is somewhat fatter than the original rod diameter. Using a paddle or a barrel will change how your cane looks! Then stripe colored glass onto the paddle or cylinder, parallel to the rod.

If you want rainbow cane, make a paddle, and put the color widthwise on each side of the paddle, as if you were crossing the T relative to the upright rod. On the short edges of the paddle, lay glass parallel to the rod -- that's what makes the colors stripe one after another on the pulled cane, but keeps the black constant down the rod.

One of the lovely things about latticino is the brilliant color you can achieve. Layering a transparent color on white gives you a clarity that is unmatched. The problem is how to get the color to last throughout the cane and not get too pale and attenuated -- a couple of the ones below have inconsistent color. Generally, the thinner you plan to pull the cane, the more layers of transparent color there should be to make sure you get the depth of color you want.

Here are some of the other ones that we pulled, or that I pulled this weekend:



Now I just need to learn to USE twisties so they stay recognizeable. Mind you, they are perfectly lovely when you jumble them up, but I'd like to practice using them very precisely.

Here are some beads made with a green and blue "rainbow" latticino cane, laid on in stripes but still allowed to jumble together a bit. These are just from the blue part, but you can see the green shading in.



I think they have a bit of a Monet Iris look, but I called the set "Mexican Blanket," because the combination of the cobalt and green with the white and thin black stripe reminds me of the Mexican blankets we used to use as picnic and park blankets when I was a kid. I need to make a twistie with orange, pink, and hot green shades to complement this set.