Category: Glass

Another experiment in photography using different backgrounds but the same lighting…. it still amazes me how different the same piece of glass can look just by changing the background material…. there’s dark green leather (my couch), a grey polyester blend shirt, and a fairly loosely knit pillowcase from India. (the ones not pictured here were a bright blue spandex, and a couple other darker textiles)

Round 1…. I was tryign to use warm colors (reds, oranges and yellows)… and… I decided I don’t really enjoy the orange effect I was getting this afternoon. I’ve put orange away for now.

Then I took a small break and here are the results of Round 2… in round two i selected a whole different set of colors out of the box… which (since they came from some random guy near Milwaukee) I have no idea what colors are supposed to turn out like what or if they are the kind of color that needs an oxidizing flame or a reducing flame, so…. the results of my playing with hot glass are likely to be pretty hit-or-miss until I figure out what’s what in the box of glass wonders 🙂 I do quite like the ‘celestial’ effects I achieved in Round 2… coming up this week? attempting to repeat an “effect” or a “design” in roughly the same size as each other… wish me luck.

here’s what I did this afternoon…. notice I started out awful, got a little bit more interesting…. then got worse again (#5) and then the last one was OK again… also, that first one took a bit over an hour (eeeek!) but the next ones took less and less time until I was down to about 15 minutes per pendant. I would have done more, but my arms got tired (and I got hungry). I guess if I start donig this every other day again, I’ll build up my tolerance 🙂

These are all borosilicate glass (a.k.a. pyrex) which has some qualities that are waaaaaaay different than the soft glass I’ve been doing up until now. Most noticably different is the reaction of the colors to the flame…. boro does somethign called “striking” and… I still don’t have the hang of it….. ALso, boro uses much hotter temperatures and requires adjusting the flame to be an oxidizing flame (rather than neutral)….

And then this was me trying to figure out which background to use… light? or dark? or light? or dark?

these pins are incredibly entertaining for me to make. You could say that they are somethign close to ‘instant gratification’ although, thinking back on it, they are certainly *not* instant. Many steps go into these, starting from making the glass beads out in my garage studio (how will I continue torch work when it’s cold outside??? 🙁 to bending the wire, hardening the wire, sharpening the tip of the pine and then cleaning up any scratches or dings i’ve done to the metal… at any rate, I really enjoy making them.

Still working on that whole camera/focus thing….