Playing With Techniques

Tonight I added photos to my previous post, so scroll down to see the progressions of the photos.

I've been very busy with work for school and making wedding jewelry, so there hasn't been much time for torching. But I have been consuming Cindy Jenkins's book, and I was finally ready to try some new techniques the other day.

Technique 1: In the very end of the book, she gives some troubleshooting tips. One tip enabled me to finally make a perfectly round and shaped bead! This tip was that newbies tend to apply glass to the mandrel without starting at the very tip of the molten glass. I started doing this, as well as shaping up a basic bead before adding more glass, and the improvement has been huge! Here's a photo of my first Perfect Orange Bead.


Moving from perfection to definite imperfection (otherwise known as experimentation), we move onto the saga of the semi-lentil. Debbie had told me that the best tool to make lentils was the Target ice tongs. The "famous" Target ice tongs, in fact. So I went to Target, fully intending to buy a pair. And I thought that would be easy! No such luck. It took a long time trying to ask unwilling associates to help me, but in the end it seemed they were out of stock. I found some Oneida ice tongs, but they didn't seem to make an even lentil shape when closed. There was an item that was out of stock, and the tag read "SS Tongs," so I figured these must be them. When the customer service folks tried to look them up, however, hundreds of items came up! So I kept hitting a dead end and ended up buying the Oneidas.

I used the Oneidas to smush the bead (below), which is not an even bead, or even really a lentil, but came out kinda cool, looking like honey. Then, since I wanted to experiment with eye dots, I gave it eyes on both sides. I don't really know why. I don't like this bead, but my fifth grade students love it! They think it's so cute!


My final bead for the day was a dual experiment. On one side I decided to place a millefiori piece. Since my first attempt smushed the glass all to weird shapes, I discovered that a) I needed to make a bigger base bead, and b) I needed to raise the piece to my hot glass, which I did with the back of my thing with the little ridges in it that I don't know what to call - help, anyone? Anyway, it eventually worked. The pic of the bead makes it look like the black feathered out, which it didn't; it's only a reflection. Also, when pushing the millefiori in, it distorted the beads, and I was reluctant to round it out too much for fear of ruining the millefiori. So I used the tongs again to help even up the sides and square up the bead.


Finally, I wanted to try making a flower, so I did so on the other side of the same red bead. Needless to say, it's pretty ugly, but hey, at least it's recognizable as a flower! Unfortunately, a little of the yellow glass turned threadlike and attached itself to the bead. Oh well!