A while back I fused a bunch of bullseye strip onto a large white sheet, with the intention of slumping a bowl from it. (Actually, I think I meant to crosscut the strip, realign it in marginally interesting ways, then slump the resulting sheet into a bowl mold.) The edges and some other areas were unusable for this, so I decided I could strip the glass and make beads out of it.

Around the time I made my original “howto” post on stripeys I made a batch of beads out of one of the strips, and was unimpressed: the beads often only had one color, varied a little with white, and thus were boring. Lately, I've been fooling around with the bullseye scrap lying around and figured I might as well start in on the other two strips of this type. Sure enough, many of the beads were again monochromatic and rather boring, and not only that three of the fifteen beads, or a whopping 20%, cracked during or shortly after the air-cooling process.

This rather surprised me, for a couple of reasons. But let's back up a bit and discuss the reasoning behind this working method. As always there are several goals: 1) make good beads 2) make beads fast 3) check beads to see if they're good. Unlike most of my other beads which are made in two or more steps (make base bead; apply decorations) stripeys have the decorations put on first, that is, built into the rod. Thus once I make a stripey bead it's done, and there's no reason to keep it warm. Indeed, if I'm trying out a new color combo (using the mashup method) I want the beads to cool, to see if the combo works (goal #3). Thus if I'm making multiple beads on a mandrel—and I like to think my shaping skills have improved to the point that bead number 2 will be as nicely shaped, or at least have (almost) the same potential of being as nicely shaped as bead number 1. This was not always the case; for some period of time, the second (proximal) bead was often more poorly controlled than the first (distal/tip-end) bead put on the mandrel.

Ok, so the point is that this issue probably didn't come up the first time I tried making these beads from this strip (or maybe it did and was one more reason I didn't pursue the method.) Certainly the website has gone more from pure showcase (show only the best beads) to a documentation project (let's write about these horrid beads cuz they're so bad it's funny, and the mediocre ones so I won't make the same mistake 15 months down the road—and maybe someone else will profit besides...)

In any case, when I make stripeys, I make one, make the next, and so on, without going back to rewarm the bead. This not only saves time and and concentration effort (it takes a goodly amount to keep track of how much a bead has cooled, because it's easy to crack a partially cooled bead with a too-severe blast of heat—there's that tradeoff again, between heating it gently and slowly, and getting the job done fast) but reduces mental stress on the beadmaker—often but not always a plus in my book.

Now then, I could put the mandrel of variously cooled stripeys right into the kiln, and chances are the coolest will survive, especially if I'm not clumsy and touch it to the support rack, floor or side of the kiln, another bead, etc. But as it happens, I am clumsy, so I just let ’em air cool, and batch ’em later—it's not as if ramping them up as fast as the kiln will go (10 min or so to 900deg.F) is a problem, and I run my kiln on a relatively frequent basis to preheat rods, for beads that really do need to go in directly, etc.

And, normally, the production beads I make are fine with this. Once in a great while one might crack, but it's not common. However, three of these beads cracked. Now, part of this could again be my klutziness—touching a just finished bead to a cooled one, for example, which I suspect might've happened to the petal pink bead, which looks a little thicker-walled, anyway. But I know for a fact that the red and green bead was sitting all by its lonesome, and cracked while I completely absorbed in something else. In fact, I heard that ominous clink on at least two occasions. Note also the length of the crack: it stops abruptly at the color boundary between green and red.

This says to me that for all of Bullseye's vaunted compatibility, there's something wonky going on here. I think, once they're annealed, bullseye glasses probably are highly compatible. But they've geared their compatability towards the fusing market, and the stresses are different—fusers simply aren't concerned with glass behavior at room temperature—strain levels (roughly 820 degrees) because they don't manipulate glass at those temperatures—it merely sits a slowly carefully ramped up kiln at that point.

Lampworkers, on the other hand, have temperature gradients ranging from room temperature to molten all along a rod every time they heat it up to make a bead. And as I've said, bullseye rods have this nasty habit of dropping inch long chunks off the hot end—though I do think this has improved. I don't mean to be perpetually badmouthing the glass—it has some splendid qualities, not least of which are a fantastic range of pinks and purples, and a cream (french vanilla) that mixes with turquoise blues without that nasty black sulphur reaction. The bullseye stripeys I made last time air cooled just fine.

But for some reason, transparents, especially transparent reds, crack when made into beads, even (or especially?) when made from fused and annealed upon white in Bullseye. Does this mean I've given up on prefused striped bullseye stripeys? Hardly. It simply means a couple of adjustments. One would be to vary the color more frequently, perhaps by using colored strips for both layers, perhaps laid at 90 degree angles at each other, making every other strip a white or pale opaque to improve the patterns instead of making only one layer colored strips on a white base; and the other would be to put one bead on a mandrel at a time, popping it immediately into the kiln, or, if I'm feeling in the mood for more of a challange (sometimes I am, sometimes not—stress in some quantities is a good thing, remember, keeps us from getting bored) I'll just keep bead 1 warm, as I have to do with all my other multiple-beads-on-a-mandrel, before sticking it into the kiln to prevent the cracking problem.

file created 11aug06.

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Sylvus Tarn