Fun New Murrini Tools

While I was in Tucson - I stopped by the new Glass Artists Bead Show - there's a story there, but that's for a different post - anyway - CG Beads was there - the Bead Roller folks, so I stopped in to look.

Now I'm mostly too free-form for bead shaping roller type tools - and while I think they are fine - most of my presses migrated to the BeadFX studio for anyone to use there. However, when I saw these,

 I was ... oh - it's an optic mold. With a handle ... because ... and the gal running the booth finished my sentence - "optic molds get hot."

We actually repeated that about three times, like a mantra. Because - this is effing brilliant.


 You can see here with a little bit more of an angle that there is a handle on the back. Hold the handle, plunge the glass in, and you are in no danger of trying to hold onto the hot mold - which is cool the first time you use it, and burn-inducing every time thereafter.

If you are still scratching your head on what it is, it's for making murrini. Get a blob (gather) of glass hot - plunge it into the hole, it takes on the shape of the hole, you then add colour around the outside, and stretch out into cane, and slice it up into murrini.

 See, nice, easy flower murrini.

















OK - next cool murrini tool - this murrini holder. Stand your murrini slices in the cavities so that they stay upright, don't fly away, roll away, etc.



Plus nice lentil or cabochon cavity up at the end. 

So now you can use the murrini you just made, without half of them flying away as you try to apply them to the bead.


 Another brilliant tool.

So, two great tools for the murrini enthusiasts, or those that might want to be. ;-)

There is, btw, a nice little description of how to use the cross shape mold (above) on the CG Beads page.