OMG I had so much fun!

I am fortunate to have a friend who has a great lampworking setup, and she invited me to come over today and play on her Nortel Minor Burner torch.  I currently have a Hot Head torch, and while satisfactory, it's very slow to melt glass and tends to have a reducing flame (since it only uses propane and "hopes" that the air intake holes on the side are sufficient for adding oxygen to the flame).  But, the Minor, wow!  I've played on her Minor before, but I hadn't had sufficient practice on my own torch or read enough online to really comprehend what kind of benefits I'd get from the Minor.  Today, though, I felt like I was owning the flame.  Like I could make it do for me anything I wanted.

I had planned to try to do some encasing today on the Minor since Hot Head's suck for encasing, but after the fire we had yesterday (a totally separate blog entry will have to be written up for that) I decided to take advantage of the Minor to start making beads for my project.  I still have a few stringer I need to pull, but I really wanted to get started on those beads.  AND... my friend has a CG BEADROLLER!  Whoohoo!  I actually got to play with the small donut roller the whole time, and yes, it is even better than I would hope. I was able to use it to size my beads while still molten so I could make consistently sized beads.  (I'm really bad at that.)  It was a dream to work with, and I'm going to order one as soon as I wake up in the morning.

Getting tired.  I wanted to say so much more but it will have to wait til morning.  But I will say this:

Watching the Minor's flame on the bead was like watching water smoothly carve a rock into the beautiful shape hiding beneath the surface.