Glass Bead Flame Designs: Fritting Techniques

Video Transcript

"Welcome back. My name is Harlan of HarlanGlass.com. I am here to present yet another segment demonstrating a key glass making bead technique. The technique of this segment will be the use of frit or powdered glass. Now, frit is powdered glass and it comes in different grades. There is very fine, which is like a powder; all the way, ranging to very course or gross which is like kosher salt; kosher rock salt. The important thing to know about frit is the more powdered it is, the more fine it, the more dangerous it is and the more you need to take respiratory precautions so as to not disturb the powder and breathe the dust. Glass dust is toxic and possibly carcinogenic. You don't want to inhale it. Cowboys who are on the high plains breathing smashed dirt which has silica, which is essentially glass, come down with an illness called silicoses. So minimize the contamination of glass powder in your environment by keeping your use of frits to a minimum and avoid the very powdered frits unless you have a good respiratory system and in the case of powders you probably want to don a physical barrier such as a respiratory mask that filters out very fine particles. Because I am not using a very fine powder in this demo I won't be using the breathing mask, but I will use common sense gentle motions to keep from disrupting this bowl of sand consistency, fine sand, powder. This is powdered glass, it's a certain color, it comes from a certain company known as Reichenbach and this stuff is magic. It's called R108. Folks let me tell you this is great stuff. It produces unbelievable results, variegated colors like you would not dream of without a whole lot of effort. My kind of glass trick. So, I'm going to put my little can of R108, Raku, or Iris; which is what it is known as, The Reichenbach down on my table. I'm going to pick a nice good mandrel. I'm using the marretti or effetre pallet of glass and the coefficient of expansion is 104. The Reichenbach frit that I will use is not the coefficient of expansions. I've cautioned you before you viewers out there in computer internet land not to use different coefficients of expansion, but there is always an exception to the rule and that exception is when the other non compatible coefficient of expansion glass is minimal. The use is minimal maybe less than ten percent, maybe less than five percent. That will surely be the case with the application of the frit to this bead once I'm done with it. So, stage one and this is just totally a matter of design, I'm putting a transparent emerald, melting it in, gently marveling it into a nice little cylinder, almost like a crow bead. So, that was the emerald. On top of the emerald I'm going to put a little strip of that darker topaz, right in the middle, so we'll have multiple colors going on in the background. Notice again, the bead is below the flame. If you're tuning into this and you've seen no other videos in this series or sequence remember that bead making is a dangerous activity. At the very least you want to look at the segment that I've created with the help of the experts at Expert Village on safety. So don't neglect the safety. Don't go out and start melting beer bottles thinking you can do this. There is a whole science to this and it's really important that you safeguard your eyes, your home, your lungs, and your family. Taking care not to blow yourself up, burn yourself up, lacerate yourself or destroy your neighborhood. So, consult an expert, take a class with somebody who knows what they're doing. Don't rely on this video to teach you everything you think you need to know to start out as a bead maker. Ok. So, now I'm melting clear, keeping the bead that I made, the base bead warm. I'm not really going to clean this clear much. I'm making sure to get a pretty good oxygen flow going so I've got clean burn, but I'm not going to clean this thick clear rod much, because I'm going to put frit over it anyways. The frit will cover over any kind of imperfections or flaws that are in the glass. I'm putting a giant dollop of clear over my base; my transparent emerald topaz base. This will be a fairly large bead. Don't tug on that mandrel too much; remember you can dislodge your bead. Break the bead release and then you've got to start over again. So, go kind of slow and let the glass, let the torch heat the glass up just right. You can feel it. You know play with this and start learning about feedback and how this feels to your hand, to your eye. It's really about getting familiar with how glass behaves in a torch environment. We've got my glass on, the clear. If you want it's a little bit wobbly, you can true it up, carefully, very carefully. I'm going to take my bead and I'm going to get it kind of settled down here, but then I'm going to heat up the outer rim so it's nice and tacky, sticky. I'm going to roll it into this little saucer of my R108. Like salt or pepper the R108 will stick to the syrupy, honey surface of the bead. I'll bring it back into the flame, heat it in and I will have a frit bead; a multicolored frit bead. Here we go, heating that outer ridge. Now I rotate fast. Now into, I sort of tamp it down. There you have it. It's kind of like one of those powdered donuts. There was one little spot that didn't get so you can kind of go back and do that. Now you can go crazy. You can go fast. The raku is very sensitive to oxygen or propane. Now it's melted in and you can stop. You can stop right there if you wanted or, or there's more you could actually go and put a layer of clear now over that. So, keep it warm while you are developing your gather of clear. These canes will often thermal shock. Sometimes people use rod heaters. I have one in the background. It's basically a hot plate. Sometimes I rest my canes in between use on them and that keeps the tips hot. Which is kind of nice and it prevents thermal shocking. Now, I am spot heating the background bead because I know that the Reichenbach R108 is sensitive to the torch and by spot heating it I bring out certain interesting colors that wouldn't normally happen if I was just gently heating it all the time. Then let it cool off and that brings out other colors, sort of a nice pebbly design. At the same time it gives me more time to develop a bigger gather which is going to allow for a nice good coating of clear. Here we go. Trying to maintain an even thickness of clear so I'm slowing down in my application because I'm not using gathered glass any more now I'm just sort of heating glass up in real time, the feed glass; the feed clear. I've made one complete rotation and I'm in flint. Now, I can sort of keep that puffy warm in the background and go for another small wrap of clear. We are almost done with our application of casing. So, this is a frit bead that is now finding itself cased in clear. If we did nothing else at this point this would be a lovely disc bead. We could pinch it and make it into a disc bead or we could also melt it down, let it slump onto itself so it becomes a normal squat bead. It will be very pretty."