Half is better than none!

Well after the disaster yesterday morning with the butterfly murrini wing, in a fit of stubborn bloody-mindedness I went back for round two last night (about 10pm) . I sawed the remaining wing in half to give me two sides once again, ramped it up slowly and made my white/green butterfly. I got to bed about 2am but felt a bit less cranky about the whole thing. Its extremely irritating that I have ended up with half of the volume of cane, but that is much better than none at all....... I will admit the need to repeat this to myself each time I look at the cane! I also had to pull it rather smaller diameter than I would have liked because of the small volume at 1.5cm, but they will still be quite usable.


I have chopped the cane in half and thought I would slice one half up into slices to tumble to application to beads and leave the other little bit for pulling into small bead sized diameter later if I feel like it.

Next project: a Pink/purple and white butterfly with some playing about with edge colouring etc. and to stop being a wuss about starting the face of my complex fish murrini. The scales and the eye is done, but I keep putting it off.... just don't want to ruin the work so far I think!

White butterfly disaster has struck!!!!!!!!

Hmmm, well I had better come clean on here when things go.....er...... astray too!

I have been thinking about the butterfly murrini and colours and stuff and thought that I would make a white butterfly with green lobes.... hopefully it won't look like a moth dressed up as a butterfly, but it would be worth a play around at any rate.

I made the graduated green lobes which was fine and they came out really nicely. I dedided that I would put yellow surrounded by some clear for the small dots on the wings to try and make it sort of "delicate" and that turned out quite well. I made a couple blue/green dots for some extra oomph and they came out ok..... see for yourselves, this pic taken this morning just before attempting to put together for the final pull!

Being lazy and yet, in a bit of a hurry, I decided to ramp my kiln up very quickly and to avoid some crack-a-lacking when introduced into the flame put it on 560C. Well, rather than let the components soak somewhat at this temp I just couldn't wait and as soon as it it the top temp I got my first part out......... Crack time.... yep, huge big splitting nearly in half nasty cracks with bits falling off and completely ruining one half of my cane. Needless to say I was grateful for the kids all being at school, because there was some nasty swearing (even the FG one - F#@ Glass).

Once I had killed most of that side of the butterfly I was then left thinking..... what the hell do I do now? I decided to pop it back into the kiln and see if there is some decent slices to be had off the cane for fusing or polishing and left the other intact cane in there and put the lot back through a long annealling cycle. I am going to cut the one good half in half again and try putting those together in a more measured and careful manner.

Remember folks..... the murrini never forgives and is a card holding member of the Murphy's Law of cocking up!!!!!

NOT HAPPY!!!!!!