Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Hot Glass: First Beads in a looong time...

Finally! I bought my starter Lampworking kit last friday at "Artistry in Glass" (in London, ON) and got set up today in my friend's garage!

I spent most of the day re-acquainting myself with the Art of glass bead making.

My skills are sooooo rusty, but I'm sure they'll come back to me with a little work.

It's clear to me that I'll have to figure out a bulk MPS gas situation since I used up the whole 1 lb. container today and only got 8 viable beads out of it (that is if they survive the annealing process in the kiln!).

I'm using COE 104 Effetre (for the most part) glass and there were a few surprises. My "silver" wire that I wrapped on the ivory glass to get a reaction turned out not to be a particularly pure silver and it looks rather "fugly".

What I thought was "sky blue" turned out to be a gorgeous silvered reduction blue. It came from the "Gambler Pack" of glass that I had bought at the very reasonable price of $4.50 for the lb. It has a variety of glasses that are un-marked and sometimes a little broken. (I figure that I need to pinch a few pennies while I re-learn the basics.)

Still struggling with getting a nice round bead, but that said, I'm pretty happy with how the day's beads turned out.

3 comments:

jodi said...

I love plain old number five. So pretty! But, why am I counting nine beads?

MizMerryMac said...

Um, that would be because I counted the two matching spacer beads (#7) as one bead...I'm perverse that way!

Kelly (Cainder) said...

Way cool! They're all beautiful.

I'm jealous. I'm so hooked into working on the house right now, I can't find either the time or the energy to do really creative stuff right now.

By fall I could be having a creative crisis! LOL