Anticipation... is keepin' me way-ay-ay-tin!

I haven't torched in a few days, and while I'm craving gettin' my torch on, I'm also looking forward to having a new torch, with oxygen, and hot fire, and melty glass, and happy happy happy beads!  Well, technically, in the popular vernacular a "happy bead" is a bead that's been properly annealed, but I'm sure they're much happier beads to begin with if they're made an an oxy/propane torch instead of a Hot Head.  I can't wait to get my hand on that thing and just mold the glass rods into beads in a perfect oxygen rich flame.

And once we get the torch up and running, I'll start making so many beads I'll have to get the kiln electrified, 'cause I don't think that Jon is going to be none too eager to put a plumber's torch in that thing again.  Considering what happened the last time, I wouldn't blame him either.  I'll test my theory tomorrow and push for annealing the batch we were going to anneal last week.  We'll see if we can get to Ace Hardware early enough to buy a good hose clamp, so we don't have a repeat of last week's debacle.

The update for today on "the project" is a picture showing what I decided to do to label my beads.  I've heard of people using little price tags on strings, or organizing them in boxes, or even writing up note cards with pictures  (which sounds kind of like the thing I would do), but I decided on a more direct approach.  It all starts with a numbering system.

I have assigned a number to each color of glass I have.  The assignation is random, I just picked up a glass and said, "You will be #1."  I marked it with a sharpie (which I'm discovering will need some reworking because the sharpie rubs off if you handle the rod too much) and pulled a stringer or two from it, then marked the stringers with a piece of tape on the end (like a flag) and numbered with the same number.  Then I made a grid:

1,2	1,3	1,4	1,5
2,1	2,3	2,4	2,5
3,1	3,2	3,4	3,5
4,1	4,2	4,3	4,5
5,1	5,2	5,3	5,4

If I were (un)lucky enough to only have 5 colors of glass, I would be making 20 beads (ah, the bliss!).  The first number is the color of the base bead and the second is the color of the stringer.  But, using the grid as a checklist only helps if you can then subsequently identify the beads you've made against the chart.  That's where the next picture comes in.  I'm so clever!  I made this image so large so you could see the detail.

The sharpie works to mark the glass.  You'll see B16 on the bottom; that means that the base bead is made with color 16.  On the top you'll see an S5; that means that the bead was decorated with stringer in color 5.  These are the same beads I showed pictures of the other day at my friend's house.  Two colors of beads, and 8 colors of stringer.

And now, before the next huge batch of glass comes in, I'm gonna go organize the glass I already have.  Baby and Hubby are asleep, so I get my "me time" -- starting at 11:19pm.  Oh yay.

An impossible task...

So, you might have been laughing at me for the last few days because you realized something I didn't really get until today, but this color sample project is not gonna fly.  I just bought yet MORE glass today, another 25 colors!  If I stick to this project religiously, I'll be making color sample beads until my 2 year old's grandchildren are having grandchildren!  I don't even think my calculator has enough digits to figure out how many beads I'll have to make with all the glass I want to buy.  So, yeah, color sample project put on hold.  What do I do now?

Well, with all this glass I'm going to be buying I'm going to need a way to store it!  So, off to the research races.  Some people at LWE have been using this to store their glass.  While really nice looking, I'm not accustomed to storing my glass laying flat.  I'm not saying I won't do it, I just never have.  But then, I've always had about a pound and a half of the stuff, so it's not like I needed much of an organizational system before now.  And we just got done building new upright pvc glass storage, too, but it barely fits the 3 pounds of glass I have now, let alone the 7 pounds I just ordered today.  Oh my, 10 pounds of glass.  What WILL I do with myself?!? :)

The reason I splurged and bought so much glass is because Creation is Messy (CIM) is discontinuing a host of their colors, and a couple of my favorites were in that list of soon-to-be discontinued colors.  CIM calls their glass "Messy Color".  I just love that, it makes me want to eat it!  Or run my fingers through it.  Or something otherwise obscene!

When I checked out the Frantz Art Glass website to buy some of the colors, one of the favorites isn't even listed, but the other was, and since I hadn't bought any of that yet I decided to buy a pound, and then 1/4 pound of all the others that were going away soon.  Frantz Art Glass has awesome sales, and these discontinued colors are about 60 or 70% off right now.  I hate Frantz Art Glass, they make me spend way too much money!

In case you're curious, my favorite color is blue.

Beads from my last session...

Here are the results of my labors at my friend's house.  If my description of my color project confused you, this image will probably help.

As you can see, there are three "sets" of beads.  The bottom one is just a little fun I had with Devardi glass (if I recall correctly; I guess I'll have to ask my friend and edit this post if I'm wrong).  The top two sets are part of my color project.  You can see that the base beads of the first set is green, the base beads of the second set is orange, and supposedly, I used the same set of stringers for each.  Besides the fact that I made one less bead for the greens, it appears that the green glass of those beads reacts quite differently than the orange glass does.  It's hard to see because the lighting conditions weren't good, but there's a lot of crackling in the stringer decoration on the green beads.  But that, my friend, is the exact reason I'm doing this project: to see how the different glass colors interact.

Even though I missed making one green bead (and now I can't actually tell the difference between some of the stringer colors!!!) I consider this first session a rousing success.  It taught me that 1, mark the mandrels somehow so I know which stringer I used (or maybe keep the stringer the same and make the base bead in all the different colors), and 2, that green I used causes the stringer to go all crackly, which is an effect I like, but if I'm not trying to do it, I should keep away from the green or only do raised stringer with that color.

There's stringer, and then there's STRINGER

Still making stringer, but when I was about to start this morning's batch I realized I'd have to label the stringer for easier identification.  I have two very close shades each of orange, yellow, red and green, and even though they're distinguishable in the rod, the stringers side by side are almost identical.  So, I came up with a simple numbering system for the rods and put a little flag of tape with the number on the corresponding stringer.  This project is all about doing way more work than I have time for, so why not add a couple more steps?

As I go through and melt the glass to make the stringer, I'm trying to note differences in the glass, but I'm having a hard time noticing differences.  It's all glass, it all melts, it droops if you don't keep turning it, but I can't see many more differences as I'm melting the glass?

I did notice a difference between my two shades of turquoise.  One shade was really easy to work with, didn't melt too fast or too slow, and when I pulled the stringer, it pulled nice and easy, but the other shade of turquoise was so soft, very liquidy when it melted, I had trouble controlling the droop even though I was turning the rod constantly when forming my initial gather of glass.  Then when I pulled the stringer, the droop drooped and I ended up pulling a very uneven stringer.  That second turquoise also reduced (I think that's the word) in the flame much easier than the first turquoise, and I ended up with some copper red in the stringer.

I guess I'm just not very good at discerning the various working characteristics of the different colors, but that's what this project is all about.  Making a permanent record of how the colors interact, and hopefully through this process I learn more about how to work glass in general.

Sorting stringer...

I just spent the last few hours sorting and making new stringer.  I had to sort the stringer I had so I'd know what colors of stringer I needed to make, but damn is it hard matching some stringer to the original rod.  Once the glass is that thin it's hard to tell whether it's this shade of orange or that shade of orange.  I actually had to get Jon's help with it, but I don't know if that just confused me more.

I ended up with about 5 or 6 colors that I already had stringer for, then I turned on the torch and made stringer out of 9 more colors.  I chose the number 9 because of it's awesome significance: that's how many divots I have in my rod rest!  Once I filled up my rod rest with possibly-hot rods, I didn't want to mess around with laying additional rods on the rest and risking dropping hot rods on my workbench.  Safety tip: lay some sort of sheet metal along the ENTIRE top of your work bench, not just underneath your torching area, so you don't have to worry about hot rods setting fire to your table top, like me.

Crazy doesn't even begin to cover it...

You might call me a pyromaniac, but I like to call myself a lampworker.  I make beads out of glass.  Molten glass.  Glass which didn't start off molten, but which I put into a 2000 degree flame and melt to molten so that I can make beads.  You might call me a pyromaniac, and you'd be right.

On top of that, I'm anal.

I started a lampworking project today.  It's a project I've been hoping to avoid because it was going to be a metric ton of work with no obviously apparent benefit, but if you listen to some of the people on the Lampwork Etc. discussion boards, no time at the torch is wasted and every bead is a lesson learned.  So, with that thought in mind, and hoping beyond hope that I can afford all the glass that goes into this project, I begin.

Goal: To learn how the different glass colors interact with each other on the surface of the bead.  For a couple months now, when I sit at the torch, I've been trying to just pick a glass rod of some mostly random color and apply some stringer of some other mostly random color to see how they go together.  Problem is, it hasn't been going so well.  Either I end up always picking the same few colors (that are my favorites) or I forget what colors I used on the bead because some interactions are so dramatic they change the colors altogether.

This is how my lampwork sessions usually end up:

So I've made a plan to make a bunch of beads of one of the colors of glass I have and apply a simple decoration of stringer of each of the other colors I have to see how the color combinations work out.  I imagine it's sort of like shuffling a deck of cards, but with fire and molten glass.  In triplicate.  'Cause I'm going to do this sampling with each of the colors.  At last count I had 32 colors, so that's 32 sets of 31 beads each. How many beads will I end up with?  992!

Besides the massive amount of time it's going to take just to make enough stringer out of 32 colors of glass, I've already encountered a bigger problem.  I just ordered more glass.  More glass usually means more colors.  How many more beads will I end up with using these 4 more colors?  Mr. Calculator says 268.  *sigh*

Ok, I'll start with what I have, make a bunch of stringer, and see where it takes me.  Obviously I can't put a hold on my plans to make sell-able beads - I'd never get around to it if I just kept making color sample beads - so I'll just have to keep two sets of glass, one for the color samples and one for the sell-ables, and just spend time each day making both.  (I think I need two sets of glass so I can keep track of which colors I already made samples of.)

Torch it!