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| Tamara has her studio set up in what used to be her dining room. She works on a Hot Head with a vent hood piped outside, and the gas line running through her cat door. This of course has to be set up each time, but is a good solution for situations where separate studio space just isn't an option. |
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| Tamara starts our afternoon torch session with a hollow Lentil bead. |
She marks the width of the press on the mandrel with felt pen and starts building up a disc on each end. |
She adds wraps of glass to each end, angling the wraps towards each other. |
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| She nudges the two discs together with tweezers and makes sure there are no gaps in the glass. |
Then heat it all up until glowing. |
And then into the lentil press. She is using Corina's Lentil press. |
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| Pat Doyle then took over the torch and made one of her lovely fishie beads. |
She starts by making a hollow bead. |
When the hollow is closed and heated, she adds stripes of colour, winding back and forth across the bead. |
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| Then presses the hollow body flat with the large bead mashers. |
Next she adds large white dots for the eyes. |
And then a dot of red opaque on the front end for the mouth. Here she is pressing a line into the center of the dot with a razor knife to shape the mouth. |
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| Now the fins and tail. Using two colours of transparents, she attaches and trails the glass. |
Then a pinch and a pull with the tweezers to give them the right shape. |
A small black dot in the center of the eye, and some carefully applied heat to even it out and it's done. |
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| Tamara is going to do a galaxy bead for us. She starts by pulling stringers from 221 Lavender and Vetrofond 218 using her tungsten pick to attach and pull the ball of glass. |
She makes a small base bead from 058 transparent, slightly barrel shaped. She then rolls it in a generous amount of silver foil, and burnishes it down to the bead surface. |
She burns the silver in, paying special attention to burning off the foil near the hole.
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She takes a dark stringer (doesn't matter the color - this one is black) and spot heats one spot on the bead - touch the stringer to the surface and twist - wait for it to cool a bit (blow on bead if necessary) then snap off the stringer. This creates a galaxy by swirling all the colors together. The stringer takes longer than you think to cool, and I think that's why I always have trouble doing that. Tamara likes to add just a little dot of silvered ivory stringer over the dark dot left behind by the stringer.
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The areas where she hasn't added opaque color have little silver stars left on a dark field (looks like deep space). She repeats the twisting 3 or 4 times around the bead and then encases with clear. Tamara does all her casing with Lauscha clear and does a "linear encasing". Get a ball of glass hot on the end of the rod keeping it cooler behind the gather. Then push the ball on with a firm downward stroke. |
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| The second stripe goes on the same way making sure there is contact with the previous stripe. She has the best results without bubbles or casing lines with this method. |
She puts small dots of clear at either end where the stripes meet to even out the glass volume and then heats it up starting at one end to drive any bubbles out. |
Checking to see if the glass is evenly distributed around the core and nice and round. |
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| Naomi trying out the super soft Satake glass. |
One of Naomi Hobb's vessel beads. |
Deb starts her vessel demo. |
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| She is using aqua transparent and making continuous wraps starting at the lip and working right down over the end of the mandrel. |
She adds some extra glass to the hip of the vessel and marvers it lightly to create the shape. |
Now she is putting lengthwise stripes of a light violet pastello. She put on four stripes starting just below the lip. |
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She attaches a boro punty to the bottom. |
Now, keeping the heat on the larger mass of the bead, she starts twisting the bottom. She twists and pulls slowly until she has the length she wants and then burns the punty off. |
She is adding a bit of glass to the lip to finish it off. |
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| And heat it up, give it an all-over warming to even out the heat, and it's done. | The finished vessel. Thank you Deb. It had never occurred to me to make a twistie right on the bead! |
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