Fish murrini rescue success....... YAY!

Yup, I have been having an absolute ball melting glass lately. I just can't seem to get enough time at the torch although that then leads to the evils of NOT ENOUGH GLASS..... he he, not really true for me at the moment, but a gal always wants some more glass hey!

I decided that I hadn't done any decent murrini for quite a while and thought I might make a random bodgy sort of fish.... Really stupidly I decided to temp fate and make a fairly plain stripy one pull fish.... predominantly yellow (for those who aren't bitten by the lampwork bug, that was the stupid decision, to go with Yellow). Yellow it is commonly known amongst murrini makers is a naughty little bugger who loves to crackalack a lot after encasing in clear once pulled. Needless to say, I finished my pull (which incidentally was a beauteous thing to behold, one of those rod pulls that goes smoothly and evenly). I will admit that I had buggered about somewhat getting the resulting fat rod into the kiln and when I checked the next morning there was more "crack" than you'd find on a plumber....... it was pretty much completely crazed and cracked all over, yet still sticking together... mostly.

At this point.... thank goodness the kids had gone to school, but holding that cracked log of glass in my hands was a bit soul destroying after investing about 2hrs into it and about a lb of glass to boot. I ALMOST binned it or threw it on the ground in a huff, but fortunately decided to conduct a small experiment instead. I wondered if I carefully sawed it into bits then preheated it in my kiln at about 630 C (regular annealing temp for me is usually 515 C) then reintroduced it to the flame, cap it, heal the cracks and pulled to about 5mm diameter if my bodgy fish could be resuscitated at all....... YES indeed it could as it turned out. Pulling some murrini cane into 4-7mm diameter worked very well, they chopped up nicely and I now have a baggie of many, many fish murrini which is fine with me, if not the usual way I like to keep my murrini. I like to store my murrini in rods of about 4cm diameter then slice it up later and pull smaller if I want some bead or marble making sized slices

Here's a pic of some of the small slices I got off the cane, like I said it was a very simple slightly ugly fish murrini that was straight out of my brain as I went with no planning on shape or colour at all..... fairly obvious I am sure!