handpulled

Tips & Techniques: How to Utilize Conical Rods

Frantz Art Glass & Supply currently has a sale going on for a bunch of glass colors in conical form. Any glass color that has conical rods in the batch is indicative that the glass color was handpulled and not machine made. The conical rods are the part of the glass pull that is closest to the punty, thus the strange shape. Read more

Have Your Ever Seen Blue Goldstone / Aventurine?

I was really excited to see that our Italian glass friend not only made us a new supply of goldstone ribbon cane, he took it a little farther and made a batch of blue goldstone ribbon cane!!! Not only that, he made 2mm goldstone handpulled stringers that are not diluted with clear glass which makes them very dense in sparkle and color. Read more

Tonalities of Dark Pink, Gold Pink and Coral glass rods

When you order some glass colors, is it a surprise to open the box and find a radically different Tonalities of Dark Pink, Gold Pink and Coral glass rods you were use to?  Well, this is something that happens with certain glass colors and it took me a long time to get the Italians to explain why this happens.

It seems that there are a handful of glass colors that are very sensitive to heat and even the amount of humidity there is in the air when the components are measured and put into the batch.  Murano is built on tiny islands in the middle of a large salt-water lagoon and is constantly subject to varying levels of humidity that can make a powder (which is the form the elements that go into a glass batch come in) be lighter or heavier.

Another component of the tonality variable with certain glass colors is heat.  I complained for years about the changes in the shades that Coral (591420) would shift to from batch to batch.  A couple of years ago I was shown a sample book of a single batch of coral and there was a huge difference in the tonality from the beginning of the pull to the end of the pull, there was about 6 different tonalities in a single run of coral!  The factory said that they try to send what they think coral should look like, but we told them that they should sell all the tonalities to us because they are all beautiful in their own way.

Two other colors that have huge tonality variables are Dark Pink (591265) and Gold Pink (591456).  What you must do if you get a tonality of the three colors I have talked about in this blog and you like it a lot, get as much as you can.  With these colors, it is kind of like getting yarn to knit a sweater.  If you don’t get enough yarn of the same dye batch to make your sweater, when you go back to get more yarn, there will most likely be no more of the batch that you bought and your sweater will have two different shades of the same color in it.

I have been trying for 25 years to get Effetre to make a pinkish coral that I got in the very first batch of glass I ordered from them ( when the factory was still owned by Moretti) and I am still waiting.

Shown below are sample cards of the different Corals, Dark Pink and Gold Pink, to give you a sense of how different these three colors can be from batch to batch.

A sample board showing the range that Coral #591420 can come in.

A sample borad showing the range that Gold Pink #591456 can come in.

A sample borad of Dark Pink #591256 that shows the range of tonalities this color can come in.

Effetre Silver and Zucca Glass (3/12/09)

I am writing about the Effetre Silver and Zucca Glass for Lampworkers colors named “The Silver Challenge 7 Rod Assortment”, which were given out or sold with orders placed in mid-November.  I am urging everyone who got this glass to please send in photos of their results (good or bad), so that they can be entered into the raffle for a box of rare glass from Mike’s vault.

The seven glass colors in the "Silver Challenge" assortment.

A beadmaking friend, Sue Stewart and I both did test beads and I am posting different examples of what we got from these new colors.  We want to see what everyone else  made out of these new colors.

I liked the Silver #4 the best out of the four silver colors and I really like the yellow and orange colors from this group.  Listed below are the names and reference numbers for the “Silver Challenge 7 Rod Assortment”.

• Silver #1 – 591718
• Silver #2 – 591719
• Silver #3 – 591720
• Silver #4 – 591721
• Yellow Ocra – 591411
• Lt. Zucca – 591425
• Dark Zucca – 592426

BTW Sue Stewart is teaching several different classes at Frantz Art Glass focusing on techniques for using silver glass in beadmaking.

Bead made out of Silver #1 with twisty of Psyche and Opal Yellow, then encased with Aether.

Core of bead made with Silver #4 and encased with Aether.

Bead by Sue Stewart made with Silver #1, Ivory and Clear.

Bead by Sue Stewart made with Silver #2, Pulsar and Mermaid.

Bead made with #591425 Light Zucca and silvered Ivory shards.

Core of bead made with Silver #3 decorated with a Psyche stringer and encased with Clear.

Bead by Sue Stewart made with Silver #3 and encased with clear.

Bead by Sue Stewart made with Silver #2, Unique Sapphire and Clear.

Bead made with Yellow Orca and decorated with Black Metallic shards.

Bead made with Silver #4 and decorated with reduced Triton designs.

Bead made with Dark Zucca and decorated with silvered Ivory shards and Triton.

Bead by Sue Stewart made with Silver #1 over Teal.

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.

Vetrofond - the Other Italian Glass Factory

Most beadmakers have heard of the Effetre (Moretti) glass factory on Murano near Venice, Italy, but fewer beadmakers know about the other Italian 104 COE glass rod manufacturer Vetrofond.  Vetrofond is located across the lagoon from Venice on the main land in a suburb of Mestre, which is the main industrial port of the area.

Cullet Storage Yard at Vetrofond

Carts of Glass Rods at Vetrofond

Vetrofond is mostly involved with making custom modern looking blown glass lamp fixtures, but they have a large set up for producing 104 COE glass rods.  In past years, they have gone out of their way to produce interesting limited runs of odd lot colored rods for the international lampworking community, like River Rock, Parrot Green, Poppy, Ocean Green, Frosty Blue and Key Lime.

Currently, there is a huge selection of odd lot colored glass rods made by Vetrofond with names like Cosmic Storm, Jupiter,Seashell Swirl, Dark Lichen, LemonMeringue, Orange Punch, Yellow Ice, Jungle Twilight, and Sweet Lime.  There are over 50 odd lot glass rod colors from Vetrofond that greatly extends the color palette of glass beadmakers.

Jupiter with Triton & Dark Pink

Vetrofond Transparent Yellow with Triton and Goldstone

Vetrofond has a very unassuming front to the building which masks the intense levels of activity going on inside the factory.  It is a factory which is both dangerous and thrilling to see in operation with hot furnaces, huge metal equipment and lots of organized glass shards.  There is such a swirl of activity that it is mind boggling.

I have personally made only a modest dent in the huge selection of available Odd colors from Vetrofond, but I have been please with the results none the less. All of Vetrofonds colors are compatible with other 104 COE glasses and I highly recommend that every beadmaker take a spin through the Vetrofond palette, for the adventure that is contained within each glass rod.

Nyx over Vetrofond Emerald Green

Vetrofond Seashell Swirl, Ivory & Black