1. Base: Small barrel of transparent glass.
Darker is best. I tried red sparkle, medium olive, electric blue, and dark purple and they all look fine. The darker transparent seems to make a more dramatic background for the silver and reduction frit.
2. Add small dots of rubino oro. Melt flat.
I don’t have that, so I used the red sparkle. Can probably use gold aventurine, too.
3. Wrap in silver palladium, burnish, burn off.
4. Add some bits of reduction frit. Melt flat.
I chose matching colors for the red, olive, and blue, but also tried some raku. Raku rules!
5. Add random dots or swirls of silvered ivory stringer. Melt flat.
6. Encase in clear and melt to a nice round bead.
This is where my technique suffers. I am not great at doing a smooth encase, the base colors often surface between the layers of clear; and often, I have more clear in one spot and the bead is uneven.
7. Press in lentil mold.
My sizes and shapes were all wonky, because one of my deficits is making consistently-sized beads. I need to count the number of times I wrap the glass around the mandrel, and I haven’t been doing that. If you have too much or not not enough glass for the mold, both size and shape will be off.
Lessons learned:
* Keep a marver in non-dominant hand during shaping/melting flat steps. By the time I did my last few beads in this series, the barrel shape was actually pretty good and I was much more comfortable with the marver.
* Lay out correct amount of silver palladium beforehand.
* Don’t add too much frit: it takes over the bead.
* Regain barrel shape before encasing.
* Use Lauscha clear for encasing. It’s just the cleanest!
* Don’t overheat after encasing.
* If bead is too small, the lentil shape will not “take” very well.
* Bead needs to be perfectly round with hole exactly in the middle. Period.
I’m looking forward to getting the new lentil mold: it has 3 different sizes in one mold, so designing jewelry within a set will be easier. The shape is a nice canvas for all kinds of fun stuff!
Glass Act 