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Originally published at Two Glassy Ladies. Please leave any comments there.

This morning I got a few hours in at the torch. Lots of experimenting, which is always fun, although I have to fight with myself for not feeling “productive”. Of course learning new things by experimenting is productive, but torching up a sellable set somehow feels moreso.

Anyway. More playing around with Psyche – I tried some different ways of reducing it, I did try leaving it unencased. I did clear stringer decoration on top of it. I found that it was really easy to burn off the reduction once I put the bead back in a neutral flame, so after doing all the decorating and stuff, I would give it another shot of reduction flame. One thing I am starting to realize with working with this glass is that you have to let it cool and reintroduce it to the reducing flame, then you can actually see the reduction happening all over the place. It looks reactive and very neat. I think some of the problems I had before were in trying to reduce it while it was still glowing. For one thing, you can’t see what’s going on. But the reaction seems to happen way more if you let it cool enough. It’s always a challenge though, I wouldn’t want to cool it TOO much because that would introduce thermal stress and I might end up with a cracked bead.

I took pics while torching today

Originally published at Two Glassy Ladies. Please leave any comments there.

My mom made this video, I thought I would share it. This is what makes up a large bulk of what we do at craft fairs. I do some of the grunt work (cleaning bottles, manning the booth), and I sometimes help out making wind chimes, but mostly this is my mom’s stuff. The bottles are slumped in a kiln; the wind chimes are all made from recycled glass that has been broken up and slumped in the kiln over various molds and stuff to make interesting shapes. Similar molds are used with the bottles; it gives them some cool embossed style shapes, plus helps keep the bottles from rolling around in the kiln.

It has taken her a lot of experimenting with annealing schedules to make sure these bottles are annealed. We have put them in the dishwasher and not had cracks. We’ve actually even dropped them on cement before and they haven’t cracked! (Not that I would recommend doing this, I think we may have gotten lucky). The trick is a “shotgun” annealing schedule. I don’t actually know her complete schedule, but it takes around 24 hours for the whole thing, and it involves soaking at several different temperatures, just to make sure that the proper annealing temperature has been hit. There’s no way to know *exactly* what it is for unknown glass like bottles.

Originally published at Two Glassy Ladies. Please leave any comments there.

image heavy, but they are all small..

Originally published at Two Glassy Ladies. Please leave any comments there.

So, today I was playing around with making pendants, mostly. Maybe I will edit this entry tomorrow with some pics? Anyway, I have tried the implosion pendant thing a little bit before, but haven’t had any major success. Today was a bit better, I think (we will see when they come out of the kiln).

For reference, this is what I am sort of going for. The pendant in that photo is borosilicate, which tends to do all sorts of gorgeous reactive colour things. I don’t think my torch could handle boro, maybe it could, but it would be fairly slow going, it melts at a higher temperature than the glass I work with.

Anyhoo. My experiences with making implosion pendants in the past have had some of the same problems:
– Colours of the implosion not showing up very well
– Major trouble with the loop part of the pendant
– Trouble with keeping the round shape of the thing while fighting with the loop/breaking off punties etc.

I did find some good tutorials today.
Flower implosion tutorial
Implosion marble tutorial (but I found this useful for pendants, too)

The first problem I’d been having, with the colours of the implosion not showing up very well, I basically have already figured out the answer to. The first part sounds obvious, but it wasn’t to me at first – transparent glass isn’t really visible in implosion form. Duh. This also applies to colours that may not seem transparent, but actually are. Certain colours seem to show up better as implosions than others. Today, I tried some silver cinnamon (which I reduced as I went), and silvered ivory. I chose these colours because they tend to react in interesting ways, and I just LOVE the way the borosilicate pendants look. We’ll see how they turn out! The implosions looked quite visible. I also tried using Psyche, with some black that I thought was normal black but was probably intense black because it started doing the spider-web thing (which maybe looked interesting, we’ll see); I tried to reduce the Psyche as I went, too, but I’m still not very good at working that colour, and it didn’t look very visible. It looked sort of transparent and almost bubbly for some reason. Anyway we’ll see how that looks.

As for the loop part of the pendant, I have given up trying to do an off-mandril loop for pendants, I don’t even have anything decent to grip the hot glass with off-mandril. Just plyers. So I’ve been trying the technique of making a bead on a mandril, sticking it in the kiln, making the pendant, and then pulling the bead out, reintroducing it to the flame, and attaching it to the pendant. This seems to work fairly well. I have found that making a bead in more of a pendant bail shape rather than just a plain old round bead seemed to look a bit more attractive.

To keep the roundness of the thing is another story. I felt like I was making progress, though!

Basically what I did was, make the flattened maria shape, add dots all over (not randomly, but in circles). I used an 8 mm (I think) clear rod. I did my best at reducing the dots once they were melted in (made reducing flame about 1.5 inches long by turning down O2), then imploded by directing the heat at the edge of the maria. Once all the dots were imploded, I squished it back down on my marver (trying to keep them as centered as possible), then added more dots, and repeated. I think I did 2-3 layers of dots on each pendant. Then, I used a normal sized clear rod to punty onto the pendant, melted off the bigger rod, and removed excess glass with tweezers. I got the (already made) “loop” bead out of the kiln, and put it back in the flame. A few times it cracked, but I healed it, sometimes it reintroduced OK. I heated the spots on the pendant and loop that I was planning to join, and then squished them together, trying to keep the whole thing as centered as possible.

The next part is a bit of a pain. I found that it was really easy to accidentally heat up my loop and distort the whole pendant. When I did this, I actually found it was possible to fix by squishing the whole thing flat on my marver using another flat-sided tool to squish from above. But still I’m sure the result was nicer by NOT distorting this part at all. Anyway what’s tricky I guess is getting the punty off and healing the spot it was in. I’ve heard some tricks, like using pyrex punties which will just snap right off since they aren’t compatible, or just not really forming a good seal between the punty and the pendant… but I don’t have pyrex punties, and I guess I made too good of a seal. Anyway I ended up with some excess glass. In the best cases tonight, I managed to pull off the punty and then the excess glass without distorting the pendant loop too badly.

I also tried a few more colour experiments for lentils that I don’t quite remember. I was playing with Psyche for a while, trying to get the reduction on it just right. It seems that it sometimes gets more purpley colours, and other times almost pastel blues. Encasing with clear seems to bring out the most colour. I tried encasing with a few transparents too (I think I tried a pale purple and a pale green). Also, drawing on it with transparent stringer before encasing seems to bring out different colours still in the places “drawn” on.