Sunday, December 04, 2011

CiM 702: Auburn update

After playing with the CiM Auburn - I had a couple of questions about it still - so I went back to the torch to experiment with it some more.

One question I had was: How would it look as a white-cored cane; and the other was: How does it encase, because, once you've been lampworking awhile, you realize that opaque red has a tendency to be unhappy about being encased. You may remember  that using Auburn thin enough does reveal it to be a transparent, but it is dense enough that it will read as an opaque. (Many of the "Hot" colours, opaque yellows, reds, oranges don't handle being encased well - and can crack. The usual fix for this is to make a clear core bead, encase it in a thin layer of the troublesome colour, and then encase in clear. This reduces the amount of iffy colour to a lower percentage of the glass and usually allows you to get away with it. Some of them look paler when encased - this does not, however, fix that.)

Here is the white cored cane.

 And here is it used. It went on pretty dense and dark, but you can see the light and dark effect that I am coming to be very fond of. It reminds me of scribbles with a felt marker.

BTW - these pics were shot under a hot, incandescent light to show the red colour.

 And here it is, Auburn encased. It is a little streaky - but no issues with cracking, and looks fine. It is, I will grant you, and stunningly bad example of encasing. Scum and bubbles and yuck.

I'm still trying to get around to trying the pickling technique for cleaning the clear glass. It's proving to be rather harder to find a container the right size than it is to get my hands on the pickle.


2 comments:

  1. Hi Drew,
    I use a tall glass spaghetti jar for pickling my rods, I keep my pickling solution in there and place the jar in a pot of hot water when using it. Just put the rods in, wait ½ - 1 hour, renew the hot water and turn the rods over if they are longer than the jar.
    Rinse and dry - that's it.
    My pickling solution is 10% sulphuric acid, btw.

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  2. oooo - that sounds WAY easier! Thanks!

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