Lampworking & Glass

I was told sev­eral years ago that if you have round beads that have bro­ken in half due to ther­mal shock, you can use your kiln to slump them down into lit­tle oval cabo­chons and thereby make use of oth­er­wise wasted glass. This cer­tainly appealed to me, being one to not waste any­thing. I mean, other peo­ple have nubs and shorts of glass that they are always try­ing to get rid of, but MY shorts get used up until there’s essen­tially noth­ing left.

Of course, the peo­ple that have slumped their beads were doing it with “soft” glass, aka COE 104 Effetre/Moretti/Vetrofond glass. Did that stop me from try­ing it with my poor borosil­i­cate bead halves?

My first attempt was in my own kiln, which wouldn’t get above 1700 degrees. That isn’t hot enough to slump boro. Although the lit­tle bead halves looked a tiny bit flat­ter and more pol­ished, they still had their lit­tle grooves on the backside.

Then I took them over to my par­ents’ house to use the big guns, er, kiln (my mom’s pot­tery kiln) on them. I was fig­ur­ing what the hell, let’s give it a shot, so I set it to ramp up to 2000 degrees and let ‘er go. Four hours later, that kiln had topped out around 1930 degrees, and I had no clue whether the beads were slump­ing or not. I said to hell with it and cut off the con­troller to let them cool down overnight.

When I went back and pulled them out the next day, they were def­i­nitely slumped into nicely shaped cabs…but almost all of them had turned from their nice bright boro col­ors to a cloudy yel­low!! Dismay!!!

Accord­ing to my friend Jo, that was the sil­ver in the boro color react­ing at such a high tem­per­a­ture with the clear, and there is noth­ing to be done at that point. I still ran the cabs through the kiln one more time on my nor­mal boro strik­ing cycle, which may have helped a few of them, but most remained that cloudy baby-poop yellow.

Con­clu­sion? EPIC FAIL.

Unlike you may think, I don’t torch right up until the night before a show try­ing to make as much prod­uct as pos­si­ble. Tonight, in fact, was likely my last ses­sion on the torch before this weekend’s Down the Street Bead Show.

Any­thing that’s made on a man­drel — that means beads — has to be cleaned after it comes out of the kiln and off the man­drel. That means haul­ing out the handy Dremel and zap­ping all the bead release out of the mid­dle, under water. Yes, it’s messy! Once the beads are cleaned and dried, they have to be sorted and culled. The wonky ones go into the Infa­mous Wonky Box, first-quality exper­i­ments go into the Orphans box, and sets have to be matched up and grouped together before going on dis­play. Sets and focals also have to be inven­to­ried and priced. The beads have to be placed into the appro­pri­ate box or on the rods for the big upright dis­play so that when we get to the show, we just put the rack together and it’s ready.

Actu­ally, I had intended to just do pen­dants tonight, since they are not made on a man­drel and there­fore don’t need bead release cleaned out. All I have to do is pull them out, rinse them off, and voila! ready for inven­to­ry­ing and tag­ging. But I real­ized that I had most of a really cool twisty remain­ing from torch­ing last week, and that I should really fin­ish off that set. So I did reg­u­lar beads, and teeny beads for ear­ring pairs, and a small focal bead to use it up. Then came the pen­dants — two hearts and two stones. I’m hop­ing that the odd lot batch of Solara I got recently strikes as nicely on pen­dants as on the two exper­i­men­tal beads from last week. If it does, it’ll be used for a lot more heart pendants!