104 COE glass
What is Zanfirico Cane?
I became aware of the existence of a type of Italian decorative cane called “Zanfirico” the first time I visited Murano back in the early 1990’s. It is stored in the same warehouse at Effetre with the murrini cane and was a titillating eye candy experience.
Zanfirico cane in the Effetre warehouse.
Zanfirico is a hand pulled cane style that requires a lot of skill to produce and is very popular with the traditional glass blowers on Murano, who do beautiful blown glass pieces with ribbons of fine twisting colors in stunning vases, bowls and other glass objects.
Frantz Art Glass has had Zanfirico cane available for many years, but it was marketed as “Marble Stock” in our catalog and on our website. The colors of Zanfirico that Frantz had in the past was not as delightful as the new batch that is now available and there is a better selection of cane sizes to pick from with this new shipment.
Since there are all these new styles and colors of Zanfirico, I decided to see what I could do using this cane style to make beads. I had a lot of fun seeing how I could make fancy 2 mm stringers out of 15 to 20 mm thick pieces that were 2 – 2 ½ inch long of zanfirico cane. I heat these short thick pieces of zanfirico cane in my annealing kiln at 1000F and then pick them up out of the kiln with a glass punty that is heated at the pick-up end to sticky hot. I then transfer the zanfirico chunk to the torch flame and start warming it and add a glass punty to the other end. When the zanfirico chunk starts to get soft, I start to introduce more twists into the cane and when it is ready to pull out, I continue to add more twists to make them compact enough to look good in a bead. This treatment takes a little practice, but is well worth it.
Here is a side by side photo of the larger zanfirico cane and the stringers I pulled out of it.
While I was experimenting with the zanfirico cane, I discovered that some of the cane patterns actually looked better when I applied a 5 to 6 mm cane directly to a thin bead cylinder on a mandrel and heated and twisted the cane down as I melted it around the bead. This technique allowed me to use the cane in its’ full size which made the cane pattern larger and more visible and I really liked the results. Instead of wispy twisted patterns of color, I got beefy twists that were more dramatic.
A photo of the punty and larger sized stringer that I pulled for an 8 mm cane, notice how it is wavy and this goes away when reheated.
If you like exotic stringers, I highly recommend trying some of this new shipment of zanfirico cane. It saves you from having to make it from scratch and it allows you to introduce details into your beads that are difficult to produce and very lovely to see.
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| Blue spiral zanfirico over base of CiM Creamsicle with Peace and Cornflower dots | Blue spiral zanfirico over base of CiM Rose Quartz with an accent stringer of goldstone. |
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| Pink spiral zanfirico stringer over bead made from Intense Blue. | Bead made with 6 mm zanfirico cane with multiple threads of blue and yellow that was warped around the mandrel and tips of Intense Blue were added for accents. |
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| Blue spiral zanfirico stringer warped around a round bead made with CiM Pumpkin. | Round bead wrapped with 6 mm cane line zanfirico in black and white over a core of CiM Chalcedony. |
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| Yellow line zanfirico over core of Intense Blue with dots of CiM Pumpkin and Cornflower, made with a 6 mm cane. | Pink line zanfirico over core of CiM Cornflower, made with a 6 mm cane. |
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| Pink spiral zanfirico stringer over CiM Poison Apple. | Goldstone zanfirico with black line over a core of CiM Great Bluedini. |
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| White line zanfirico stringer over CiM Tuxedo. When line zanfirico is pulled down to stringer size, the zanfirico can become very wispy. | Small round bead made with a 6 mm rod of blue spiral zanfirico. |
Click here to view current stock of Zanfirico.
CiM / Messy Color Has Four New Colors!
Oh Boy, its spring and Messy Color has come out with some wonderful new colors to add to their palette. There are two transparent and two opal colors and they are call Rainforest, Azure, Atlantis and Appletini.
- Rainforest – 511499
- Appletini – 511497
- Atlantis – 511598
- Azure – 511500
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| Rainforest #511499 | Appletini #511497 |
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| Atlantis #511598 | Azure #511500 |
These new colors are yummy, yummy, yummy and I had a blast melting them to find out how they work when I made them into beads.
I made beads with silver foil cores that were encased with the two transparent colors Azure and Appletini and they came out great. I discovered that if you apply the encasement gather when it is too hot, it will yellow your foil. All I had to do to correct this problem was to apply the encasement gather just a little cooler than white hot and it didn’t yellow the silver foil.
Tabular bead with core of Azure wraped in silver foil and encased with Azure.
Tabular bead with core of Appletini covered with silver foil and encased with Appletini.
Rainforest and Atlantis are both opal colors and I have to say that Messy Color has the nicest and easiest opal colors I have ever used to lampwork beads. These two new opals are succulent and I couldn’t help myself and I mixed dichroic into three of the beads I made with these new opal colors with good results.
Check out the beads I made out of these new Messy Colors and decide for yourselves, but I give them a huge thumbs up!
Core of bead is made with Rainforest that is covered in dichroic pieces and encased with Appletini.
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| Bicone of Rainforest with a diagonal band of blue on clear dichroic that is edged with a goldstone ribbon cane. | Bicone of Atlantis with a band of dichroic dots on clear with goldstone ribbon cane. |
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| Round bead made with Appletini decorated with swirls of Mermaid. | Core of bead is made from a twisty made of Azure, Rainforest, white filigrana and a light sky blue filigrana. |
Did you know that CiM/Messy Color has Fabulous Stringers? (6-10-10)
In spring 2010, CiM began producing stringers of some of their more popular colors that would translate well to smaller diameters. Read more
In Search of the Perfect 104 Clear
The perfect clear glass rod is the holy grail of beadmakers. A perfect clear should resists scumming and be optically free of streaks and bubbles. This said, the perfect clear is hard to find and there are many more clears to choose from on the market these days.
A lot of beadmakers are tired of picking the scum and bubbles out of the clear glass that comes from Italy. One way to improve the cleanliness of your clear rods is to wash your rods in your dishwasher and many beadmakers swear that it helps a lot.
Larry Scott developed a technique for good clear. He places his clear rods in pickling solution that is used to take the scum off of silver after it has been soldered. He uses the solution at 1/3 to ½ the strength you would to pickle silver, in a long Pyrex baking dish that can hold the 13” rods comfortably covered with solution. The pickling solution works best if it is warm and leave the glass in the solution for a while, an hour or so (experimenting with time lengths is always a good thing to do). When you take the glass rods out of the solution, thoroughly rinse the glass and let it dry standing up on its ends so the water slides off.
The two Italian glass factories that provide a lot of the glass available to beadmakers have tried to make a better clear over the past 10 years, but their efforts have still fallen short of what most beadmakers would consider a perfect clear. The cleaning techniques that I mentioned above help to improve the cleanliness of the Italian clear glasses, but I have heard many complain that it still falls short of what beadmakers would like.
There are a number of new efforts by newer glass factories like CiM, Double Helix, Troutman Art Glass and Precision 104. All these companies make good clear glass, with CiM being the only one that is competitively priced with the Italian glass. Some beadmakers still complain that CiM clear is not perfect enough, but the factory goes out of its way to hand wrap the clear glass rods to prevent scratches and dirt accumulation.
Double Helix, Troutman Art Glass and Precision 104 have all produced premium clear with a premium price tag. I hear various complaints about these clears also, but from personal experience, I find they are superior to what the Italians make and a whole lot easier to use. The biggest complain about these premium clear glass rods is the price.
If you have come up with a system to improve the clarity of any of the available clear rods on the market, by all means please leave a comment on this blog.
Aether by Double Helix can be acquired in "Artist Points" store at Frantz Art Glass.
Paddle made with CiM / Messy Color Clear.
Paddle made of Diamond Clear by Precision 104.
Bead made with Clarity- Super Clear by Troutman Art Glass.
Paddle made with Vetrofond Clear.
Paddle made with Effetre Clear.
Tips and Techniques: Dichroic on Copper
I am a die hard dichroic fan, but I had not paid much attention to the CBS Dichroic on Copper Sheet because at first I couldn’t get my head around it. When I first saw some dichroic on copper sheet, it was Silver and it just didn’t catch my attention. Recently I was shown a dichroic on copper sheet that was a pattern called “Mixture” that has soft blues and pinks in it as well as silver and I said to myself – WOW, this stuff is really neat looking. I had a sheet that had been slightly broken up and the bag was full of cool looking dichroic bit-shards. The dichroic shards really got me motivated to make some beads with it and I really like the results.
Dichroic on copper sheet with loose bit-shards.
Loose dichroic bit-shards on graphite pad.
You have to be careful when you open the bag of Dichroic on Copper and have a sheet of paper under the bag to catch any shards that might flake off. I put the dichroic shards that I had on a graphite pad that I use for rolling up shards on to beads and it works really well.
The dichroic on copper sheet was designed to provide dichroic that can be put on any glass, so you don’t have the problem of matching the glass you are using with what ever the dichroic is coated on. Another great thing about the dichroic on copper is the fact that the dichroic layer on the copper is 3 times thicker than any other way that dichroic is normally applied. The thicker coating makes the dichroic much more durable and less likely to burn to that gray scum that everyone hates.
Bead made with dichroic shards from copper sheet.
The copper sheets also allow the artist to cut patterns or strips of dichroic in the sheet and roll the dichroic right up off the copper onto a hot bead or other lampworked form.
CBS (Coatings by Sandberg) has a good instructional video posted on the web that is good to watch and it provides some great working points that help in using this product. If you have never seen dichroic on copper used, I recommend watching this short educational video on the Sandberg website.
In case you are wondering what to do with the sheet of copper once you have used all the dichroic, the copper is of a thickness and quality that it can be used to apply cut out patterns of copper on to a bead. I have seen some stunning examples of this technique and highly recommend giving it a try.
Dichroic shards on bead made with CiM "Electric Avenue and Gunmetal.
Tips and Techniques #3 - Making Your Own Custom Frit
I have noticed that there are a lot of people who like to use frit in their lampworking projects and custom frit blends have been really popular for a long time. If you are one of these folks that like to use frit in their hot glass projects but would like to try some unusual frit or personal blends, there is a simple way to make small amount of frit for your own personal use.
The things you need for Making Your Own Custom Frit :
- Torch
- Pair of lampworking glasses
- Pair of big mashers
- Jar of cold water
- Small fine wire strainer
- Good size slab of graphite (optional but nice to have)
- Hammer
- Some really thick brown paper or thin cardboard
- Dust mask (always a good thing to have on hand)
This whole process is really neat because you can take glass rods that you really like the color of, but there is no frit available and you can make your own in no time.
Make sure before you start that you have really cold water ready at your work area. Take a rod of the glass color you want to make frit out of and heat it in your torch until you have as big a ball of hot glass on the end of the rod that you can handle ( it is different for everyone). Take your mashers and flatten the ball to make a paddle and then return the paddle to the flame to totally reheat it but not melt it, this gets the paddle ready for the next part of the process.
Take your red hot paddle over to your ice cold water and plunge the paddle into the water, making sure that you have glasses on in case the water splatters a little. It seems too simple, but the plunging process fills the paddle with tiny fractures that cause the paddle to turn to frit.
Once you have made enough paddles to make the amount of frit you want, the next thing you do is take your strainer ( never reuse the strainer for food after this process, it should be for glass work only – find them at the thrift shop) and pour the water into another container. Some people like to use coffee cans for this process, but they do rust after a while.
Let the frit drain for a little while to get most of the water off of it. I take a graphite pad and I dump the frit on to the pad (wear your dust mask when you do this, even though the glass is wet) and spread it out as thin as you can. At this point you can either place it in the sun (if you actually have warm sun) or you can place the graphite pad on top of your kiln and use the heat the kiln gives off to dry the frit. Since I live in the Pacific Northwest, the kiln drying method is the one I use most.
After your frit is dry, you can use it as is or you can put it between two pieces of heavy paper (I save really heavy brown shipping paper or thin brown cardboard for projects like this) and lightly hit it with a hammer (wear your dusk mask for this process also). You don’t have to go crazy with the hammer because the glass is already filled with tiny fractures and will break down to smaller pieces fairly easily. I typically save portions of the frit from each phase of the hammering, so that I have an assortment of frit sizes to use.
All you have to do now Making Your Own Custom Frit is label and store any frit you don’t use immediately.
Review of New Messy Color Blues
I talk a lot about Messy Color glass because I really like the quality of the glass and how wonderful it handles in the flame.
A few months ago, Messy Color came out with a group of new blues to add to their line of colors. They are Freman (turquoise pastel), Smurfy (dark turquoise), Grumpy Bear (periwinkle) and Cornflower (dark blue). All four colors are of the pastel variety.
Smurfy with Triton Flower
The two turquoise colors are a fabulous addition to the current lampworking palette because of their working proprieties. If you have ever used one of the Italian turquoises, you know that they have a tendency to pit as you work with them. The Italian dark turquoise turns black /gray on the surface the more you heat it in the flame and is such a frustrating color to work with, that I stopped using it 15 years ago.
Cornflower & Pumpkin with Triton
The good news is that both Freman and Smurfy are wonderful creamy pastel turquoise colors that don’t pit or turn black. I was thrilled when I tried them out and discovered this fact.
Freman -Triton – Hades
Smurfy with Ivory
Cornflower is a dark, rich blue and the Grumpy Bear is a periwinkle blue, both colors have the same fabulous working proprieties as the other blues mentioned above.
These four new blues are the latest addition to the Messy Color palette of blues of which there are ten. The other blues are mostly transparent or Messy Colors fabulous opal colors, with the exception of three opaque blues. The other blues in the Messy Color palette are as follows:
For those who have not noticed, Glacier looks a lot like that infamous Italian Odd Lot color that was call Frosty Blue that you can’t find for sale any more.
Freman
Grumpy Bear with Rose
Cornflower
Why There Are Three CiM Blacks
Did you ever wonder why there were three blacks made by CiM / Messy Color? I’ll explain why – read on…. Read more