Shards

I've been experimenting over the past few weeks on making shards:  thin pieces of blown glass.  The technique utilizes a hollow mandrel.  a globe of glass is created on the end of the mandrel and when it is closed off and heated, it can be blown into a hollow ball of glass.  The glass can be shattered into small pieces which are placed on a gather of glass.  The result is a thin layser of color on a larger glass bead.  For example:

The above beads are made starting with a gather of periwinkle blue glass.  Shards of dark amethyst are added onto the gather after it is pressed into a lentil mold.  Then a stringer of amethyst glass is added to the top of the bead, twisted into a swirl and accented with a cubic zirconium.  This is just one of many possibilities of color combinations.  See these beads as earrings on my etsy site:  etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss.

More on copper green

In addition to the reaction between copper green and EDP which I talked about last week, copper green reacts with iris orange or raku glass, manufactured by Reichenbach.  This glass has a COE of 96 and so can't be used in large quantities with COE 104 glass, but it can be used as frit, small particles of glass used on the surface of COE 104 glass.  When it is used in this way with copper green, it produces a bright turquoise line of color adjacent to the raku, as shown in this picture:

The top bead is made with lines of raku stringer over a copper green bead.  I make the stringer by tipping the hot tip of a clear glass rod into raku frit, melting and repeating until I have a nice gather of raku.  Then I pull it into a medium diameter stringer, which I apply to the copper green core.  After melting in the raku stringer, I added a few twists for visual interest.  The bottom two beads were made by dipping a core bead of copper green into raku frit, melting the frit in and adding twists.  As usual, look for jewelry made from similar beads in my Etsy shop:  etsy.com/shop/DeborahDRoss.