Glass Bead Flame Designs: Disc Bead

Video Transcript

"I'd like to demonstrate next the making of a disc bead. A disc bead is very similar to all the other beads we've made, but instead of being squat and flat or cylindrical or squished, we're talking about a bead that goes up in the vertical and is more like a disc. It will still have a hole in the middle so we use a one-eighth inch mandrill, and I'm going to select the eye of the bead to be that beautiful black from the Effetre Palette. It's actually a transparent purple, if you were to thin it out, but I will apply a fairly dense eye right around the mandrill. A few good wraps. Melt it in gently, don't overdo it, 'cause you don't want it to be too squat. This bead is going to be a disc, so it's going to go up like a tall skyscraper instead of like a one story family dwelling. You can gently pinch it with a small masher, but not too aggressive because remember you don't want to disrupt the bead release. So that was black. We'll do sort of a cream or vanilla next, this is a lovely color, it's opaque ivory, in the Effetre palette, it's a fabulous glass, very rich looking. It has interesting properties, which won't come into play in this bead, but with other color combinations it's often a mascara line that comes as a result of using the ivory with a copper bearing color such as green or aquamarine. The colors of these glass, glasses, from the factory, come from the different metallic oxides that the silica is mixed with when the batch is produced. And there's a sulfur in these ivory glass rods that when combined with copper in the aquamarines or turquoises, creates a black reaction. Sort of a yucky black reaction but is actually very pretty when there's an interface between, at the interfaces, almost like a mascara line. So I've applied my doughnut of ivory over the black. And now I'm melting it in but not too much, and it's getting a little squat so I'm just going to gently tweak it thinner. You can keep going going with this layer upon layer, so now I have black and ivory. I think I might just go to do a cobalt layer. Notice how I keep the bead in the backdrop here while I'm heating up my feed glass, my paintbrush glass. And the purpose again is to keep that baby from not cooling and cracking. If it cracks it can fall off or the bead release can break, and then I'm finished. I can't really do much more, I have to start again. And the secret too is remember you heat the feed glass and not the bead, just like a painter wouldn't be painting on a canvas that was soupy, you want your canvas to sort of set up a little bit and it's the paint which is what's viscous. But don't tuck too hard, I wiggle, I wait, I let the heat do its job. Timing is everything in glass. And if there's areas where you think there's not enough like right here, just bulk it up, and you bulk it up by heating your glass and putting on, and use the flame as a cutter. You can dot just that same way. If you had too much glass say right there, you let the cane cool off a little bit, heat up where there's too much glass. And then pull away. Just like that. The glass will go to where it's coolest, it'll go from hot to cool. So you subtract glass in that way, or you add glass in the normal way, by heating your cane, getting it hotter than the canvas itself. So then it transfers from the feed glass to the base glass. Looking for a place to put my rod down, and that moment of taking my eye off the bead, I don't know if you can see but it kind of slumped, not a problem as long as it doesn't touch down onto the bead release. And once again you can kind of squish this bead into a wafer, nice little round wafer. And we'll put on a, maybe a vanilla stripe again, ivory, and then I'll do black. I like to do sort of repetitive symmetric patterns. Going to hold the mandrill a little farther away than I normally do so the camera can see what I'm doing. Heating up my ivory. Slow, even, you control the degree of heat, how fast it flows, by controlling the speed of the rotation, the distance of the cane to the flame, pressure that you're applying, periodically heat the whole thing up. It's called insurance heat. Last bead making it in this fashion is a rotational art, as is glass blowing, as is turning, whether it's turning wood balls or throwing a pot on a wheel. All of these are turning arts. Rotate, you can go directly into the flame at this point, fine tune the flame if you want, making it a sharper hotter flame. These lenses are great for that, because of this middle oxygen which controls the inner orifices that kind of hyper heat and hyper focus the flame, so you can get a really hot flame that's not very big. So relatively efficient with respect to oxygen which is a very important thing if you are not using tank oxygen, or even if you are using tank oxygen you don't want to keep running to the welding shop. It's a consideration. A torch that's more economic with respect to oxygen is going to be cheaper to run. Oxygen is fairly expensive in terms of refills at the welding shop. An oxygen generator is less expensive, but the drawback with an oxygen generator besides, the drawback is that you may not get the oxygen quantity that you want, if you want to make huge beads, or say you want to work borosilicate. And soft glass melts a thousand degrees warmer, less warm, than borosilicate. Soft glass does better on small torches. Want to draw your attention to what just happened. Through repeated heatings and through my manipulation with the little smasher of my disc bead, I sufficiently stressed the bead release of that, now it's broken free, and the bead is sort of loose. This bead can be saved, but I can't do a lot more to it, nor should I. Right now the bead is perfectly good, but if I were to continue to wrap another layer of molten glass around as I had hoped to, I was thinking I would finish with black, so I would have gone black, ivory, cobalt, ivory, black, if I were to do that last black layer, probably the bead would continue to kind of gyrate and be less and less ruly, more and more uncontrollable. So we're just going to do a flame and put this beautiful disc bead to bed. And that will conclude this demonstration segment of disc bead. Into the kiln, and I wait about seven seconds, 'cause I don't want to pick up any fiber blanket, I want to make sure the outer surface is not tacky, and if the bead rests on the kiln floor I want to make sure that it doesn't pick up any of the scum that's in the kiln, the grit and stuff of the refractory brick on the bottom of the kiln. So seven, eight, ten seconds, it depends on how big the bead is, a smaller bead can cool off in three or four seconds, but a bigger bead you could wait ten, fifteen, twenty seconds before putting it to bed in the kiln."