Vetrofond

Torso Beads by Joy Munshower

One of our customers, Joy Munshower, posted some wonderful torso beads made with the Effetre glass rod colors ( Sunset, Alexandrite, Green Tea, Earth, Dark Ivory, and Neptune) and Vetrofond glass rod ( Topaz ODD ). They were such great examples of these colors I thought I would share them in this blog.

The murrini used were by Donna Millard

Effetre Neptune (591230)

"Here's the fun side-by-side, before-and-after shots of a female torso sculpted out of "Neptune" glass. When I sculpt it it develops the "pewter" finish over its surface (and "haloed" around the Morning Glory murrini by Donna Millard interestingly)… I then etched the bead to expose the gorgeous mottled teal beneath." – Joy Munshower

Effetre Alexandrite (591226)

I would like to see this bead in person because Effetre Alexandrite shifts hue slightly with different light.

Effetre Earth Cool Color (591688)

Effetre Sunset Pastel (591206)

Effetre Green Tea Cool Color (591680)

This Green Tea bead looks like it was sculpted out of a Marble.

Vetrofond Topaz ODD (791989)

Effetre Dark Ivory (591276)

For more images check out her Facebook page.

About Vetrofond ELO and ELO-Pale

There has been a number of unusual “Odd” Ivory based glass colors coming from the Italian glass factory called Vetrofond lately. Read more

Glass Colors I Like and Why (10-15-10)

The new shipment of “Odd” neutral colors from Vetrofond are a fabulous base color for working with many of those expensive silvered glass colors made by Double Helix, Trautman Art Glass and Precision 104. Read more

A Bonanza of New Glass Colors by the Big Three for Lampworkers

Spring has brought an amazing number of new glass colors from the three big glass factories that supply Frantz Art Glass & Supply. Read more

More about Silver Glass Colors

I recently paid a visit to Double Helix Glassworks to ask Jed (glass maker extraordinaire) some questions on how to get good color out of some of his more challenging palette.

I bet I am not the only person who finds using the new silvered glass colors a little frustrating sometimes.  I look online and see fabulous beads that some people managed to make out of the silvered glass colors and say to myself, I ought to try that.  It is a bummer when I do try colors like Luna, Pandora and Khaos, to mention a few and all I manage to make is poop colored beads with no flashing colors of blue, teal, ruby and purple.

When I asked Jed what I was doing wrong, I got a lecture on how the crystal growth manifests in the heated glass.  What it boiled down to was that I was over working the glass when I made a bead.  Apparently if you take a bead that has transitioned into the tan – poop brown color range, you should heat it all the way to clear and take it out of the flame and cool it until it is not glowing and then just kiss the bead with the edge of the flame way out on the tip to bring out the desired colors.

One of my first beads I made with Khaos that turned poop colored.

I think a beadmakers working style and the type of torch and fuel they use has some major effects on the out come, but I have seen beautiful silvered glass beads made on all types of torches.  Jed also suggested that turning up the oxygen when I work silvered glass colors could produce better results.

I have better luck with the silvered glass colors that you reduce to bring up the metals to the surface like Triton and Aurae.  It took me awhile to figure out how to get good results with Psyche and I made a major breakthrough when I discovered that Psyche worked really well when it was used over Opal Yellow, Dark Ivory and a new Vetrofond “Odd” color called ELO.  Dark Ivory gives a more organic look to the beads when used with the silver colors because it produces heavy webbing with black lines in it.  I have become an avid fan of ELO since it arrived from Italy because many of the silvered glass colors look fabulous when you use ELO as the base for the bead.  Instead of the heavy webbing that Dark Ivory produces, ELO gets warm sepia fuming on the surface of the bead that is just plain yummy and the silvered glass colors glow on this particular “odd” glass.

Example of heavy webbing on Dark Ivory decorated with Triton.

Example of TE -362 from Double Helix over ELO.

Double Helix Glassworks has been producing more new glass colors of late like Clio and Ekho that start out looking like a transparent lavender glass and change tobeautiful lustered ruby colors – yum!

Bead made with Ekho and encased with Aether.

Tabular bead made with CiM Creamsicle and Electric Avenue and decorated with Triton.

Tabular bead made with CiM Poison Apple with Triton swirls.

Bead made with CiM Canyon de Chilly, decorated with Psyche and encased with clear.

Need More Information and Inspiration?

When you click on the Web Gallery, a web page appears that shows links for the three different sections of the web gallery that are Focal Beads, Spacer Beads and Strands. Click on one of the choices and you will be taken to a page of thumb (small images) to pick from. When you click on a thumb image, a large image will appear with a list of the different glass colors that were used in that bead and the glass colors are linked to the Frantz Art Glass web page for easy purchase, plus pertinent information on how the bead was made. Read more

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.

Break creative block and help people relate to your artwork.

Do you ever run into a creative road block? Do you ever feel like you’re in a color rut? Don’t feel alone all artists do. We just need some inspiration. One thing you can do to get past that creative block is to get inspiration from association. Read more

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.

Tips and Techniques #2 – Feathering

The lampworking technique call Feathering has been in use for hundreds of years by Italian lampworkers and I think it is very useful for decorating beads.

A long bicone of CiM Ghee with Triton and goldstone that was feathered with a 6 inch stringer.

CiM Hades over Peace with feathering done using a 6 inch stringer.

There is several ways to do feathering on a glass bead.  One way to create a feathered design is to lay down lines on your bead with a stringer.  The stringer lines can be wrapped around the bead in a spiral from hole to hole on the bead and melted enough to keep it from popping off while you are feathering the other side of the bead.  I use a 1 1/2mm stringer that is the same color as the stringer lines and it is about 6 inches long.  To make the feathering marks, it is best to heat one side of the bead at a time to prevent moving to much glass as you drag the molten stringer lines.  At the end of each drag (if you are doing the hole to hole kind), take the glass that will be clinging to your dragging stringer and make the glass go around the end of the bead which gives your feathering lines a very finished look.  Continue around the bead making the feathering go back and forth which usually takes about four passes to complete the whole bead.  The bead will always get a little distorted from the feathering and will require some reheating and shaping.

Squiggle leaf garland under roses on dichroic covered bead.

Bubble Gum Pink bead with dot garland feathering.

You can make very pleasing leaf patterns on your beads using the short stringer to feather your bead.  There are two ways to do feathered leaves: The first can be done by placing two dots of glass next to each other (about ¼ inch apart) in a row and then marver them down a little before you heat a manageable section of dots and drag the stringer between the dots.  This technique draws the dots out into a garland looking decoration.  The second leaf pattern can be produced by taking a stringer of a leaf like color and laying down a squiggle where you want the leaves to be.  Heat and marver the squiggle down a bit to keep it from popping off while you are feathering, then take your 6 inch stringer and drag it down the middle of the squiggle in manageable sections.  This technique produces very fluid looking leaf garlands.

A feathering stringer can also be used to produce swirls in color lines on a glass bead.  To make a swirl, heat the spot you want the swirl to be and insert the stringer and twist it.  At this point, you must wait a few seconds to let the glass stiffen up which will make it very easy to snap off the stringer that is stuck in the middle of the swirl.  You can also place five or six dots in a circle and heating the center of the circle, insert the feathering stringer and spin it which will make the dots swirl around the center dot made by the stringer, producing a swirled  flower design.

Dichroic and goldstone tabular bead with swirl design.

Example of a swirled flower done with a fat yellow stringer.

Another way to feather designs into hot glass that produces a more controlled look, is to use a bent tungsten pick.  I use the bent tungsten pick when I want really crisp points in my feathered design.  I love my bent tungsten pick, it has so many uses and gives you so much control over the molten glass.

I use the tungsten pick to produce zigzag feathering, where I have laid stringer color in strips from hole to hole around my bead.  You can use zigzag feathering in lots of design situation, with pleasing results.

Sapphire over Marshmallow with zigzag design.

Dichroic zigzag design over Dark and Light Yellow Mimosas

I hope this short blog on feathering will inspire other lampworkers to give it a try.

Lavender blue bicone with diagonal zigzag design.

Raised swirl design in Triton on two color dichroic bead.

CiM Pumpkin and Smurfy bead with tungsten feathered design.

Bead out of Spanish Leather with Triton and Hades ribbon zigzag design.