Spiral Tool

This is a cool tool that totally rules, it will make you drool.

I LOVE this tool - I am using it on everything. It's just a simple spiral. It works well - doesn't tend to stick to the glass, it just totally rocks.

This was my first use of it - on turquoise and copper green - if you care. 

I forget what these were - Sasha's silver on the bottom and Dalai Lama on the top, maybe?

 This is Dalai Lama on the top, and not sure about the bottom. The Dalai Lama struck beautifully - best I've ever gotten - probably due to the rapid cooling. To make the spiral tool work on a hot, soft bead, I place the back of the bead on torch marver. Here too, I started adding the wavy Micheal Barley tool.

  Here we go again - spiral and wavy. The bead itself it Vetro Black and Ivory, with all 4 of the frits I've been playing with lately (TAG Taxco and Deep Purple, Belladonna Royal Purple and Honey Glaze). Melt in, spot reduce, clear encase, mash, spiral.

 This is also all 4 frits, on Vetro black, encased, mashed and spiraled.

White core, honey glaze rod, dichro, clear encase. Let drip, mash, apply spiral. 

Here is the spiral again, also the wavy tool. The spiral is awesome. I'm putting it on everything. There's a serious danger of me completely overdoing it. How out of character is that? ;-)

More of the Beads from the Class - w Jeri Warhaftig

As I did with the classes I've taken in the past few years, I'm sharing what I made in the class. Not because they are wonderful - but because they are first beads and learning experiences.

And so that I can come back and look at them later. ;-) And maybe snicker a little. ;-)

Brace yourself - there's a lot of them. 

Embossed copper inclusions - you saw this bead a couple of days ago - so I'm just adding it here for completeness. 

 

 More copper inclusions - and learning to keep them looking coppery and shiny, instead of shifting to red. (Background glass is CiM Kryptonite, btw.)

 Getting there. Bead release broke on me though.

 Nice, but still not what I was trying to do.

Bingo! Now it's starting to work for me! 

 

 

 

This is the same bead, after sandblasting, btw. 

Working with Dichro. Again, bead release broke on me and so I didn't finish it. 

Which made it a good bead to test the sandblasting on. No sense of loss if it messes up! Lesson learned from this one - much more masking required.

 

We explored the ol' enamel + copper foil effect.  Base is Kryptonite, white enamel, copper foil.

 This is a hollow - decorated with the same enamel and foil effect, and sandblasted.

Dichro on red bead.  Happy with this one.

 

And on a leaf. Yeah - it's blue leaf. 

 

We also practiced encasing dichro on coloured backing. Here's the leftover chunk. 

We played with putting objects into a key mandrel. 

Silver foil + rubino effect. 

The sandblasting totally saved this bead - it was butt ugly. It was a hollow I lost control of, gave up and mashed and rolled in frit.  It is now moderately interesting.

This is what my workstation looked like after a few hours of my toolbox barfing out tools. 

(Yes - I moved the Tim Horton's bag before I lit the torch.)

 

 It's ... black. Actually - it's enamel.

 

And this is the same bead, after masking and sandblasting.

 And the other side.

 Other assorted beads. 

 So help me - all I could think of was this reminded me of those acrylic toilet seats with the plastic fish in them. 

Urg. This was a swing and a miss. 

 Hey - there's the Taxco frit on the obsidian base again!

And a proof of concept - dragons wrapped around a bead - and sandblasted. Needs work yet - but shows promise. 

More Reactive Frit Combos

More frit combos. I think there is something to combining these reactive/reduction frits - as the unpredictability of the chemistry from the frits reacting with each other as well as the base glass give even more extraordinary results.

 This is a base of CiM Obsidian, with Belladonna Honey Glaze frit on the left, and BD Royal Purple on the right. Notice the overlap in the center.

BTW - CiM Obsidian is my new "must-have" glass - for it's reactions with silver and silver glass.


This is the combo as above, Obsidian, with Honey Glaze on the left and Royal purple on the right, but reduced.

 And this is a base of Vetro Black - with Honey Glaze on the top, Royal Purple on the bottom, reduced lightly, encased (out of the flame - to avoid unreducing) and mashed.

Awesomeness!

Belladonna Honey Glaze - Rod

I also got some of the Belladonna Honey  Glaze in rod form - although - to be fair, it was more like stringer. Very thin rods. 

Because I didn't have  much of it, I made a base of clear, then encased it in the Honey Glaze. It didn't seem very dark - so I did 3 layers of encasing before I had some colour that I thought looked appealing.

I struck it a little (cool and reheat) and then did a gentle reduction. Note the iridescence in the reflection.

This is a base of white. This time, I only needed a single layer of Honey Glaze encasing - it coloured up much better. The right side of the bead was reduced. 

This is a base of Vetro black, and Honey Glaze stringer - reduced - and it over reduced, I think I didn't let it cool enough - it went smokey and ick - so I unreduced it (turned the oxygen back up) and burned off the haze. The end result is quite interesting.

From the class - Jeri Warhaftig

I just finished up a class with Jeri Warhaftig on the weekend, and those of you who have read back in this blog know that I don't have any expectations of getting beads I like from any class. I'm there to learn. I'm out of my comfort zone (although, learning in your own studio or one that you use frequently  - home field advantage, so to speak - is a huge plus!) - I'm pushing the envelope and sometimes it pushes back.


However, I have to say,  I'm pretty happy with this one.

This is about an inch across, using copper foil and goldstone, and sandblasted, using the new sandblasting set up at beadFX.

Thank you, Jeri and Neil. You were awesome!

Learning Something New

The last four days of classes were fabulous! There's a bunch of reasons to take a class - learn a specific technique, learn a new approach, change your perspective, put some juice back in your mojo - but the best is mostly too much to hope for - when you get a great group of students and awesome teachers and you have great synergy and everyone learns and new things get discovered.

There was so much good stuff - I'm having a hard time figuring out what to focus on here!

But these past days with Jeri Warhaftig and her husband Neil - were fabulous - we covered soooo much.

Focus. Pick one thing.

Ok.

Copper foil inclusions in a lampwork bead. Somewhere, early in the process of talking about including copper foil in a bead, I had the inspiration to try embossing the copper foil using the new Sizzix/Vintaj Big Kick Machine.(Available from beadFX - but instore only.)

So we scooped up some copper foil, and headed over to the other class room where the BigKick is stored, and tried both the Embossing Plated and the Etching plates. The lightweight 40 gauge copper that we were using works beautifully - taking a nice crisp pattern from either process.



The long oval on the far right is "Etched" - it is a single, rubbery plate with the design as a series of lines - it makes a pattern that is thin, raised lines, as you can see. The long oval in the centre is using the "Emboss" - which is a folder, with two metal plates, one a reverse of the other, and it gives you a pattern that is less about lines and more about areas. The little flower is also using the Emboss plate.

So - does it hold up to being included in a bead? Can you see the pattern, or does it degrade?

Yes it does hold up! Beautifully, as a matter of fact.

And there are oodles of patterns to choose from!

Remember - you read it here first! If you were looking for justification to purchase the Big Kick machine (or any of it's siblings) - here you go.