I'm beginning to discover that glass is more than what we look through from a warm house out into the cold harsh world. I got myself a small lampwork kit to try making glass beads. I love to watch glass go from its solid or as I am now learning "super-cooled liquid state" to soft molten flowing state. There is just something so mesmerizing about it. I'm made a few "globs" as I call them and am finally starting to make something that almost resembles a bead. One of the pieces I was in the middle of making, all of a sudden, had a heart in the middle of it so I stopped what I was doing, let it cool and called it done. It looks like a little bear holding a heart and is my favorite piece so far.
With glass fusing there is always blood, you can't work with glass, cutting and breaking it without cutting yourself. With lampwork its a bit more serious, yes I've burned myself. My lip and thumb. The lip was an interesting thing, You heat two rods of glass and pull them apart slowly to make what they call "stringers" very thin rods of glass for decorating your beads with find dots. Well was I was pulling the two rods apart, my first try I must mention, one end popped off the rod, swung around and popped me in the lip. Boy, is that stuff hot. No blister but it sure smarted for the rest of the night. Now the thumb was another very interesting lesson, I had created a small bead and was heating another colored rod to add to it, you have to balance keeping the bead warm with one hand while heating the rod evenly with the other. Kind of like playing the piano, which I was never very good at, without the notes of course, anyway, I had the bead too far from the flame and it cooled too fast. When the outside of the molten blob cools faster then the inside it fractures, it popped in three pieces, one of which landed on the unprotected wooden surface of the table. I had to grab it with my thumb and forefinger to put it back on the protected surface. Hence the burn, again no blister but a learned lesson. Fusing glass is a lot easier than working in the flame with molten glass. But it sure is fun. I have no idea what I think I'm going to do with these beads, luckily the little kit wasn't too expensive so I don't have to justify to myself that I need to do anything with them.
Why is it that we always have to justify what we get. I know I can sell the fused glass pendants. Much like the polymer clay, which, by the way hasn't been touched since I got the kiln, but the lampwork beads are less likely to ever see the light of day. I think they are more of a therapy session for me, no thought just concentration on something completely foreign to my every day life. As for the polymer clay, I still love and and as soon as the new Jana RobertsBenzon DVD gets here I can guarantee that I will be back in there playing with it again.
Well, enough for now, the mapp gas tank has probably cooled enough for me to go back down there and give myself another therapy session.....(yeah, right!)
Tootles........
