Ruben's Tube - Visualize this ...

Ok - this isn't glass - but - damn - this is cool. It IS fire - so it's close enough. This is a method of visualizing sounds using flames. Sort of a fire-based oscilloscope.





Anybody want to build one with 2500 old Minor Burners? ;-)

Drilling Glass

Here is an excellent, short video about drilling glass. It is specific to "sea glass" - but the principle is the same. If you have been experimenting with fusing, or off mandrel work, and would like to drill a hole - this is how.

The phrase "let the drill do the drilling" is really important - let the drill do the work, instead of leaning on it and trying to force the drill through.

You could make your own "sea glass" by melting up chunks of scrap glass, and then annealing them, and then etching, sandblasting, or tumbling them. There is an entire community of people out there who would consider that statement to be blasphemy,  but "sea glass" is broken glass bottles tumbled in salt water and sand. Mostly beer and wine bottles, fallen off boats. Hence the mostly clear, brown and green. Some blue - vodka, and the occasional red piece, a broken port running light.

Prince Rupert's Drops again.

I've talked about Prince Rupert's Drops before, but it's just soooo cool - here they are again investigated by Smarter Every Day.








Interestingly - he gets a speed of 1.03 miles per second which is 3708 miles per hour, vs CMOG which gets a speed of about 4,200 miles per hour.

Still ridiculously fast. 

CiM 509 Poseidon Revisited

Poseidon, or Poseidan, as I keep misspelling it, so if I throw that in there, I'll find it next time I search - anyway - CiM Poseidon is a translucent sky blue that I reviewed a while back. It is a lovely colour, and I'm not clear why I didn't buy a bunch of it then. Probably something to do with having enough glass to start a small store, but that's another story.

I had heard that there seemed to be a colour difference between the old batch of Poseidon and the new, so armed with a rod of the old and a rod of the new, I sat down to test this out. Visually - the rods seem pretty similar, the older rod "O" on the top (fatter rod) and the newer on the bottom - "N." Held up to the light - the older rod is denser, but doh, it's thicker.

But when worked up into a bead - the older rod, on the left, actually does come out slightly more opaque.

 However, this might just be a function of heating and cooling, as all three of these below were made with the old batch, and match the right bead above.

From the left, base of Poseidon with ivory dots, and two self-coloured beads.

So - in conclusion - pretty colour - and the old and the new are functionally the same (as to be expected from CiM.) Slight variations probably come from technique. That's why we call it art. ;-)

Torture Test

Here, I was doing some torture testing - pushing the envelope with the Uroboros clear.

This is a base of that purple maybe-Lauscha, rolled in palladium leaf, encased in Riley Dichro Green/Magenta, and encased in Uroboros clear. Mashed, impressed, a couple of lines of intense black laid down, decided I didn't like them and pulled them off, poked, prodded, smeared, crunched, pulled, twisted, and just generally abused.

 While the bead looks like something that you find floating in the ocean after a big storm, a jellyfish in a sweater maybe, but the glass came through with flying colours. I'm impressed. That's a real world application for the Uroboros clear.

Riley Designs Dichro: Aurora - Green/Magenta Blue

I usually just plunge into the dichro and use it, and forget to mark what I was using, so I don't often review dichro.

This is from Riley Designs, it is a CBS coating (the dichro part) and a significant part of the Riley dichro line is coated onto Uroboros clear, for it's clarity. You have to admit, coating dichro onto Effetre scummy clear just seems like a bad idea.

This is a double layer of the dichro, and encased in Uroboros clear. It's very hard to get a clear dichro bead in focus properly - I should have done a manual focus - because - dichro is designed to reflect light, and does it in such a way that it makes it hard for the autofocus to figure out where it is.

Notice you can see the green and the magenta from it's name. Also some blue, gold and yellow, because dichro just doesn't stop at a few colours! (I should have shot the glass before using it. Dichro doesn't hang around long in my studio.)

Here we have a core of some lovely deep purple that I am completely uncertain as to the provenance of, but it might have been a Lauscha glass, with a layer of dichro, and encased in Uroboros clear.  

How freaking yummy is that? Never met a dichro I didn't like.

CiM 210 Sunset

Another orange from CiM - not too far in hue from Orange Crush, but it is an true opaque, and thereby doesn't have the same luminous quality to it.












Here we have two self-coloured beads - not much going on in streakiness. Nice, solid orange.

 And here we have, from the left, base of Sunset, Ivory dots, and on the right, base of sunset, turquoise dots. No significant reaction between the ivory and the orange, and the turquoise - that has developed a heavy, dull, leaden look to it - which sometimes happens with ivory. That should come off with soaking in CLR.

Nice orange. I like the Orange Crush better, but I like the transparency factor. But sometimes, you need an opaque!

CiM 211 Orange Crush

Wowsers.

If you crush on orange - then this is your colour! This is CiM Orange Crush, a translucent/ transparent/ opaque striking orange.

Once upon a time, waaaaay back when, when I first started lampworking - I used to love Effetre's striking orange. It came as orange rods, and etched beautifully. I used to make goldfish goddesses with it.  I loved that glass. And then, one day, I bought some and it was different. It was a pale amber rod with a thin thread of colour through the centre, you HAD to strike it, and it wasn't really orange any more. More like red. Actually - a nicer red than Effetre Striking Red.

Sigh.

But now we have ... Orange Crush! Orange you glad?

This glass comes as a semi-opaque in the rod, and if you don't cook it, will stay that way - as in the bead on the left. The bead on the right - I heated to white-hot, and kilned it without striking it. It is much closer to transparent. Fun! These beads are both self-coloured.

However, thinking of those goldfish, all those years ago, I thought it might be fun to try one again. I worked off the end of the mandrel - thinking it could be hung as a pendant with a glue in bail.

It came out  pretty cool, and the tail is nicely flamboyant without the mandrel sticking out of his butt and getting in the way.

Here he is again, strongly backlit. You can see that the body - with lots of re-heating, has struck to translucent, while the fins, that get just enough heat to prevent them cracking, stayed largely transparent. 

 However, when I put him in the kiln, I put him on a rack, instead of flat on the kiln floor. And he bent. He went in flat, but drooped over the bead rack. It's actually a nice fishy wiggle-in-the-water kind of bend - probably better than if I had tried to do it - but as a pendant - that ain't gonna work. So this might be a little softer than most transparents, more like an opaque glass.

However - this is the ultimate happy orange and I'm glad to be able to add it to my palette again. Only took 14 years.

Silver Reactions

Just another test of silver reactions.

This is a base of Effetre clear. Encased in Double Helix Pysche, reduced, and then encased again on the left with CiM Flax, and on the right with Uroboros Clear.

Pretty cool range of colours, eh? The Flax has reacted with the silver in the Psyche and gone deep Root beer. The Uro clear has created an iridescence of blue and green over the Psyche.

Very cool.

Uroboros 104 Clear

Uroroboros - I know them principally for their System 98 glass - 98 CoE.

However, they also make a 104 CoE clear.

So - let's give it a whirl.

Wow. This might be my new favorite clear.

I did nothing to the rods before using - just wiped off with windex and a paper towel. These came out pretty nice! 

 It is a very soft - almost soupy - clear - not a stiff clear. However - for encasing 3D stuff - a nice sloppy clear is great - gets into placed better.

This is a base of Uroboros clear, rolled in silver foil, and encased. You can see I got a bit of yellow/gold from being a little hot, but over all, I manage to keep the silver largely, silver.

With the Effetre clear, I might as well be using gold foil - it will all change colour.


For sure, more experimenting is in order, and I do still love Zephyr - but this is one sexy clear glass!

CiM 715 Flax

CiM Flax is a pale, transparent, golden yellow champagne colour.

 Here are three self-coloured beads in Flax.

 And because the grey background was a little confusing, here there are again with a light cream background.

 This glass looked as scummy as all h3ll going on, rich, thick bubbly layer of scum on the surface - but it all smoothed away without any input from me, and made a nice clear bead - some little air bubbles, but the scum disappeared!

 This is over Palladium. Base of black, palladium, encased in flax. This was an oops, actually. I was going to try it over silver, and pulled out the wrong metal, and didn't figure it out until too late. Not like you can get palladium leaf back into the booklet anyhoo. That should have clued me in, it was too thin to be the silver I get - but I had forgotten I had any of this. The advantage to using palladium foil is that you won't burn it off or melt it in or have it disappear like silver.

 OK - try again. This is a base of Flax, a layer of silver foil, encase without letting the silver foil melt.

You can see that the Flax has reacted with the silver to make a beautiful, rich rootbeer / topaz colour. The monster air bubble stayed silver (so the reaction only happens where the flax touches the silver, and at the top, right, of the bead, it where I accidentally hit the silver with the flame before encasing and melted the silver in. Still looks pretty cool.

Flax - super-reactive with silver.

CiM 812 Jupiter Storm

I have to admit, I had already seen a preview of what Jupiter Storm can do over on the Creation is Messy website - so I wasn't really surprised by the colour change in this glass.

From the left, we have two self-coloured beads of Jupiter Storm, both cooled and struck, one with turquoise dots (a little reaction at the edges of the dots) and one self-coloured bead, unstruck on the far right. 

 This is the rod - you can see some of the range of colours that you can get out of this glass.

 And here, again, with the second bead from the left, you can see it developed a lot more colour where the flame warmed it, and on the sides, where it stays cooler, it has stayed more of a taupe colour.

I can see that I also cracked that first bead. I heard it go, and re-heated it, but obviously - didn't get it hot enough.

You can see by the difference between the beads on the left and the far right, that this glass does NOT self-strike in the kiln. If you want the colour - you are going to have to strike it yourself. Let it cool to "not glowing," and then re-introduce it into the flame to get the strike.

Looks like this one will be lots of fun, lots of variation in it!