Oh my - I may be in love again. You might call me fickle, after all, I was head-over-heels for the truly parallel mashers only days ago - but this is a glass. It's different!Metallic Black - looks like a nice fat rod of black. But, just look at what it does! Like the dark silver plum, that is so near and dear to my heart, this glass forms a metallic layer. Not sure what the actual mechanism is - it is much like devitrifying - let the bead cool and then flash in the flame and voila! You don't have to think about doing it really, as normal working processes with have it occur naturally. Unless you wind off a bead and let it cool and never touch it with the flame again, it will probably just happen.
Notice the first bead has a purpley lustre - I made that, flashed it, and went onto the second bead, so it didn't get a lot of re-working. Note, in the second pic, the shiny spot where the effect was incomplete. The bead on the right was made and never reintroduced into the flame, and has stayed a nice, shiny black.
This bead, however, I played with, heating and cooling and reheating and reducing. Not sure which of those steps did it, multiple heating and cooling cycles, or the reduction, but it has taken on a distinctly golden hue. Stunning!
Then - to experiment further this bead is a base of Laucha Thuringen Herb, with threads of Metallic Black, super heated.
And finally, the last bead is a "gravity wave" - a base of ivory, 3 horizontal stripes of Met. Black., heated to very molten and stretching out the black, and then mashed flat. Notice the colours in it. And there is some webbing and break up, on the second side. I can hardly wait to get my hands on a significant quantity of this stuff and really start playing with it. And doing scupltural beads. Oh my!
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