I just love scraps. One of my glass beadmaking acquaintances made the deadly mistake of publicly admitting that she found dealing with her rod ends daunting. Now then, short pieces can be stuck together, but the joins tend to have bubbles, and to heat-shock; and cut ends once again will be bubbly and icky. And then there are the labels, which again cause the glass to bubble unless they're removed in advance, which is why some lampworkers let their ends pile up as this woman did. So I whined and begged and just generally hinted that I really wanted that box of bits, and eventually the miniscule favors I did for her accreted to the point where she gave me the rod ends just to shut me up.
post made 6apr2005. image, 5apr2005, Nikon990.
Oh bliss, oh joy. I took the box home, washed all the bits in hot soapy water, rinsed them, stripped off the labels, sorted them by color, and was in total heaven (except when I found bits of red bullseye strip amongst the effetre—for you non-glass people, mixing two types of ‘incompatible’ glass such as effetre and bullseye, results inevitably in cracked beads—unfortunately, once mixed, such glasses can be very difficult to separate again. Hence, one of the major reasons for all those pesky labels!)
In addition to my usual approach for dealing with ends—putting a nice color-co-ordinated assortment in a metal jar lid-on-a-stick and preheating in a kiln before puntying them on a rod and marvering into a thick rod (somewhat similar to Kate Drew Wilkerson's approach to using scrap) I put some chunks into another friend's ‘rod pod’ and made multi-colored “rods”; and tried fusing 2 ‘sheets’ (for slumping into a mold) out of some others. —One more or less slumped correctly and some day will be a little dish.
The other became this suncatcher.
See, the thing about fusing glass is, fused glass goes to a quarter inch. I didn't lay down enough, so all these holes opened up. Well, I have lots to learn with fusing, obviously. But in the meantime I think this, um, experiment (i.e. wholesale failure) makes a nice suncatcher.
About 5inch in diameter. Effetre, 2005.
re-cropped & re-imported image, commented out old commands, fixed minor spelling error, 22nov17. moved image up several paragraphs, 23nov17, as pages no longer load so slowly that folks need 4 paragraphs of stuff to read while the image is loading, also added caption with date & camera info.
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
