R4 - 415 Abe's Ivy

Abe's Ivy - a beautiful dark blue rod - this reduces.

The bead on the left is all Abe's Ivy - reduced with a reduction flame that turns down the oxygen - creating about a 4 inch orange flame in the centre. The bead on the right is Abe's Ivy over Ivory. Notice that the ivory has crawled/bled into the blue. I'm quite surprised that there doesn't seem to be any secondary reduction effect on this - given that they were side by side and I reduced the one on the left.



This is a spacer made with Abe's Ivy - and reduced in a "Dragon's Breath" flame. To make the Dragon's Breath - turn off the oxygen completely, and turn up the gas until the flame is standing off the face of the torch about an inch or so - apparently completely disconnected. This is a big, wild and woolly flame. The bead did boil a bit - you can see the pitting. After Friday and Saturday's playing with the big torches - I'm now overdriving my torch and turning it up too much - trying to get a hotter and bigger flame. That darn mid-range may have ruined me.









This is a base of white, Abe's Ivy, heated and raked, reduced and encased (yes, I wrecked the encasing - see comment above about the torch). The ends are old familiar Dark Silver Plum - also boiled. Sigh.



Abe's Ivy reminds me a some ways of Double Helix's Triton - also a transparent blue and reduces to a bright silver. Abe's Ivy is a Precision glass, also known as R4, made by NorthStar. NorthStar is primarily known for it's Borosilicate colours - but also makes a line of interesting silver saturated colours. Some of you may know this as Rocio glass.

I think it easy to over-reduce this though. I made a bunch more and put them in the kiln all shiny and metallic, and they came out blue with patches of reduction - so I'm going to try again with just the briefest of reductions.