Boro color thoughts

When it comes to boro glass, play­ing with color is what it’s all about. Sure, some of the col­ors are WYSIWYG, but those aren’t the col­ors I espe­cially like to play with. What thrills me is when I take one color of glass, stick it in the flame, play with it, manip­u­late it, and it does all kinds of things on its own. Dif­fer­ent flame chemistries will change what you get — too lit­tle oxy­gen to com­pletely let the propane burn will do one thing, more oxy­gen than needed to com­pletely com­bust the propane will do some­thing else, and just the right amount of both will be dif­fer­ent still.

Then there’s what hap­pens with tem­per­a­ture changes — keep­ing it hot all the way ver­sus let­ting it cool down and then reheat­ing (aka strik­ing). Not always a pre­dictable or totally con­trol­lable reac­tion, but a big part of the fun.

Then there’s what hap­pens when you layer one color over another. One of the best is actu­ally NO color (clear glass) over a color. Where the color is on the sur­face will have one look while the color under clear will have a totally dif­fer­ent look.

One of the favorite color reac­tions I’ve seen in boro is the beads I made with Chi­nese amber glass as the base, rolled in North­star But­ter­scotch large frit, then encased in clear. It looks like there is pur­ple and blue glass in there, but no! It’s an illu­sion caused by the reac­tion of the glass that is there with each other.