Dose of Molten glass for the lampwork addict please

Yep, I have been getting increasingly DESPERATE to lay my hands on some glass rods and melt them down into thier new life. I have unpacked my garage to the point where I can now step into my workspace and touch the glass rods in thier holders .....YAY .... but still not quite good enough.

So, whats the easy solution you might ask? Well, I drove over to Bilgola to my friend Gails studio and Halleluja, we melted glass together for a few hours. It is really on just feeding the craving, but like any addict, I am sure a small hit is better than none at all. I taught Gail how to make some complex murrini cane (which she did very well at) and she let me use her humungous torch (a GTT Delta for the afficioniado's out there) to make my first unsupervised paperweight. The decision to try out the stumpsucker and make a paperweight was a quick one and so I made a very fast and dodgy-arsed setup which took me all of 15 min to make..... bit of a shame, but better than an empty paperweight, or one with just frit inside. I made a couple leaves, a gumblossom, some aussie flowers (a bottlebrush that resembled a toilet brush and some non-sneeze inducing wattle) and the main feature of a red backed spider with one leg missing - fortunately in the preheating stage we managed to partially melt another leg so he is not lop-sided.

Here is a pic of the offending article.... please shut your eyes to the haze, the smudging and the REALLY shitty shaping job I did. This was the first time that I had made a paperweight totally myself...... yep, I was a bit scared to be honest, but it was really fun (not getting it off the punty) and hopefully they can only get better!

House move from hell, still unpacking......aaarrgh

I have missed the boat to do more torching in the cool weather I think, but here is a particularly unflattering pic of me in the middle of my messy boghole of a lampworking desk just before the packing up began......................... artistic temperament = organised mess (at least that is what I told myself)

Yep the house move from hell is over, but the unpacking is feeling a bit like the neverending story or groundhog day..... box after box after box etc. I am sure you who have moved themselves totally understand the pain. We have somehow managed to get most of the house unpacked (apart from small pockets of boxes in corners), but the garage is a real disaster and my lampworking zone is a particularly nasty quagmire of boxes and miscellaneous "stuff". I reckon I either need to lose about 60kg or not fit between the boxes to even reach my glass.... well to be honest the 60kg could come off irrespective of that issue, but we had better not go there :-)

Now that the rain is giving it a short rest here in Western Sydney I thought I might get some of this rubbish out of my space. I am getting increasingly desperate to set up my torches and kiln and melt some glass. My dreams of sorting out the stuff as I unpack and start working in a pristine well organised environment is very quickly being given the bums rush so that I can just get some lampworking done................ If I wouldn't set alight to the cardboard boxes and melt the plastic ones I might already have lit the flame.......... hey, thats one way to sort out the garage ;-)

Collabaration - different glass, another butterfly

Hmmmm, a great friend of mine Gail is very VERY talented at fusing and slumping and we are thinking of forming a team and collaborating to make some really interesting glassy things. I will still of course be sticking to beads and murrini as my core business, but the idea of making some larger and more unusual glass bits and pieces really sounds fabulous to me.

At the moment we need some planning time to get all our ideas down and form some sort of a priority listing so we have some goals rather than just run about ooooohing and aaaahing about our combined wisdom and mad schemes (we are both a bit the same, the crazier the better and we feed off each others enthusiasm)

My part of the "collab" will involve me making some complex murrini and small componentry in 96coe which should be compatible with the glass sheet Gail uses and to be honest a lot of the real skill will most likely be how she does her end. Thus far my only slumping efforts have been restricted to some bottles to make platters and "cabifying" dodgy beads (melting a cleaned up bead into a cabochon). In the week leading up to the move and sticking with my comfort zone I made quite a nice orange butterfly cane which I left as a graduated large diameter rod so that different sized slices can be cut..... all larger for the larger project, but some variety of size. Here's the pic of a rough slice of the finished cane. The great thing is that if I saw up the scrappy ends we will end up with some really cool fusing slices (half and quarter wings etc.).

Interestingly enough, I found it quite difficult not to pull down some of the cane for bead-sized butterflies..... Just habit I am sure!

Now..... I MUST go sort out some of my lampworking garage space and search further for beads.......aaaaaarrrrrrgggh!

House move from hell.... where are my beads gone!

Yup, my house is a little bit like a black pit of "stuff". We have been moving house over the last two weeks and now live in a massive pile of unpacked boxes! Moving from a humungous house to a smaller one has come with a large number of trials too......... WHERE ARE MY BEADS is the plaintiff cry heard more than once over the last few days!

My darling hubby Leo has tried to be very cognisant (big word for the day there friends) of the fact that I need a usable & safe space for my lampworking with adequate ventillation and no fire hazards. All this combined with limited space and trying to plan for correct storage of my rather large stash of lampworking glass is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare. I would take a picture of the carnage, but can't find my camera..... yup, packed!

I tried to limit the difficulties by leaving my lampwork setup and beading supplies until the very last, which I thought would be a "brilliant" plan so I could access my stuff quickly at this end...... no dice! I got a rather bad headache on the last moving day and had to leave it my Leo, he has managed to shove my stuff into boxes and plastic containers which are now spread all over the place - totally not his fault, I would rather have my things than leave them behind, but now I am needing some of my beading supplies and are getting rather desperate to melt some glass again I am getting slowly crankier by the day...

....hmmmmm, unpack kitchen stuff so we can have a home cooked dinner, or live off takeaway another day and continue the search for beading supplies................................... BEADING WINS!!!!!!!

Oh, here's one of the last beads off my torch before the move - I call her a Burlesque bead (think goddess with clothes!) This lady has gone to a lovely lampwork friend Trinar ;-)

Half a dragonfly and its looking good so far!

Yay, I checked the kiln first thing this morning and couldn't wait to saw the rough ends off my half dragonfly cane..... what a charming way to wake the kids at 6.30am I was thinking!!!!!

Here is a pic of the two dodgy ends of the half cane I cut. Seeing as the lobes are transparent they are quite difficult to photograph unless you are looking up into the sky with some light behind. This morning is really foggy here which has been very handy, sort of like a natural version of a light tent! Anyway, as you can see I opted for a very fine thin tail with the thicker body and head. The gather was quite large before I pulled and I really struggled on my Minor torch to get the heat built up enough to pull, therefore there was a bit of distortion and the side that was supposed to be flat.... isnt! I may yet have some tears and swearing trying to get the two sides together neatly, but sometimes it just sorts itself out in the wash. One trick is to heat the first side quite a bit (making sure it is the more circular one) and pressing lightly on the marver to re-flatten the side prior to applying the second part. I will use the right side cane in this photo first and re-flatten it so it should fit together a bit better - will see!

I reckon that I will try to heat the tail end after the two pieces are together and bend it a bit to one side then refill the hole with clear. I think it will look more natural and way cuter to do it that way, but it will depend on how soft the clear is, I don't want a tiny hook on the end instead!

I am finding that increasingly I am listening to what Loren Stump told me and are leaving the final cane really thick. I am just slicing off a piece when I want one and pulling down to bead sized when I want and the good thing is that as a result I am now building up rather a nice stash of complex murrini canes in a more compact form rather than loads of long skinny rods.

I thought I might try another experiment with some of the large slices too. Once tumble polished I have some sheet 104 glass and I am going to try to fuse a slice onto that for a pendant.... might be interesting at any rate. Hopefully I won't end up with a marble on a plinth like I did once before when trying to fuse some tiny murrini onto scrap glass.....doh!

Hmmmm, maybe its time for something other than a butterfly..

Yep, I have not been butterflied out yet...... but getting there. I finished up a pink/white butterfly today and if I can get some decent sun I will get a pic and pop it up. To be honest the combination of white and pink is a bit wishy washy. I think it needs a dark colour around the lobes to differentiate them somewhat and also reckon that the wings would look better with something quite dark at the edges.... lesson learnt! I have drawn myself up a line drawing butterfly on MS Paint which I can use as a way to plan some colour combo's using coloured pencils before taking the plunge in glass. I think it might help rather than just trying random things and then being a little dissapointed.

My next project (that I am half way through) is to make.....da dada da ..... a Dragonfly. Yeah I know that anyone reading this is probably groaning to themselves, but I have approached it quite differently to the butterfly in some respects. I decided to make three slightly different graduated lobes in transparent blue, each lighter than the previous one with a black thincoat on the outside. The plan was to have the darker lobes closer to the body of the dragonfly and use the lighter ones on the outside, pop a little bit of clear in as a filler then more black thincoat around the outside to give a sort of delicate graduated blue veined effect of a delicate dragonfly's wing. Here is a pic of the plan (which I had to be very careful to pick up the right coloured lobe in correct order) and a bit of the bodgy end slice so you can see how it has gone thus far.

I have cut the good part of the cane into two segments which I will put together tonight into one side of the dragonfly. I am still thinking of how to approach the thinner tail end of the body and are inclined to leave the clear surround a bit thinner, so that I can put a slight twist in the tail when I construct the final two peices together and then fill with clear to make round...... hmmmm, still got the brain matter working on that one!

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!