Shards

Tips & Techniques: Making Bright Transparent Beads with Shards

I have been experimenting for a while with using some of the denser Messy Color/CiM transparents as shards over clear beads to create brighter, lighter versions of these beautiful colors. Read more

Tip and Techniques: Making Your Own Shards

One of the more recent decorating styles for beadmakers has been to incorporate glass shards as a decorative element. If you don’t know what a shard is, it is a piece of a very thinly blown glass bubble. Read more

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.

Tools for Shaping Flameworked Objects

Flameworking shaping tools is an interesting subject that comes up often in conversations with other artists who like to work in hot glass.  There were no tools to speak of when I started flameworking and I find it delightful that a cornucopia of tools have become available to flameworkers over the past 20 years. Here are the Tools for Shaping Flameworked Objects.

When I first started flameworking I only had a graphite marver that I acquired from a scientific borosilicate tool supplier.  I started out with a 5″ x 3″ graphite marver, thinking that bigger is better but I found it very heavy after awhile and switched to a 2 ½” x 1 ½” marver that I use to this day.

Graphite paddle measuring 2 1/2" x 1 1/2".

You can make a lot of different shaped beads with just a small graphite marver plus a pair of mashers.  Oh yeah, there were no mashers when I started and I had my first prototype masher made from a cut off pair of pliers and two squares of metal welded onto the pliers.  My first prototype pliers were better than no tool, but today there is a plethora of mashers available on the market and I like several of them.  The big deal with mashers besides the size is whether

TP Mashers with changable graphite heads for different shapes.

they produce a parallel mash when you use them.  My two favorite mashers are the Adjustable Parallel Mashers (#325202) and my second most favorite are the Adjustable TP Mashers (#325204) which are great for people that find the Parallel Mashers hard on their hands.  The TP Mashers also have many interchangeable graphite pads like the lentil, small radial head, large radial head, a square head and the ever useful flat head that can be changed out with the use of an Allen wrench that comes with the TP Mashers.

There are many different metal bead mashers on the market (mashers that produce the same size and shape bead every time) and I think that the lentil shape is the most popular of these, though there are many beadmakers I know that are tool junkies and have all the different bead shapers.

A steel and brass lentil bead masher.

Steel parallel mashers.

You can get bead shaping tools in graphite also that have grooved shape  in them that make producing the same size and shape bead easier for people making sets of beads and or marbles.

There are a bunch of other glass shaping tools available for flameworking that are very handy.  I love my Stump Shaper (originally designed by Loren Stump hence the name) which is a wedge shaped paddle made out of brass (also available in graphite – #306522).  The brass shaping tools allow you to really push the hot glass around where the graphite tools are kind of slippery and not as effective as the brass tools for pushing.

Brass Stump Shaper.

There are smaller brass and stainless steel tools for making smaller impressions in hot glass.  There is a brass tool called a Stick Shift and some stainless steel probes and small paddles that came out of the dental tool market, for instance.

One of my all time favorite shaping tools is a single edge razor blade mounted in a craft knife handle.  I use this tool for fine lines in sculptural beads and to make melon beads.  I started out using the dental paddles to make the small dents, but found that the razor gave the cleanest mark and didn’t stick to the glass if you kept it from getting too hot.

Single edge razor blade with handle.

Collection of melon beads made with razor blade tool.

I can’t forget to mention the different tungsten probes that are available for flameworking.  There are three sizes of the straight probes for poking holes through glass or making dents and then there is the tungsten rake that works very well to do controlled feathering on beads.

Tungsten glass raking tool.

Graphite bead and marble shaping tools.