Work in progress

This is me, making a bead. As you can see I wear protection glasses to save my eyes from splitters of glass and from the very bright light of the flame. I also wear a leather apron to protect my clothes and mycelf from flying pieces of hot glass. The flame is a mixture of propane and oxygen. (The torch is a Minor Bench Burner from Nortel.) In the background you can see the annealing oven where my beads are left to slowly cool down over night. This is to prevent them from cracking. Now I'm going to make a bead The rodsof glass I buy are approximatly 5 mm thick, wich works fine for putting on thick layers of glass. But it's not so great for making tiny dots. So I start by making myself a red stringer.

I start by melting the end of my red rod to a "blob", about the size of a pea. When it's big enough I pull it out of the flame to let it set for a few seconds. It takes a lot of practice to know for how many seconds, but after a few years you know pretty well when different colours are cool enough to be pulled to stringers. I use a pair of tweezers to grab the glass and pull.

 

 

Building my base bead

The next step is to make my base bead in black glass.I begin with melting a "blob" of black glass that I then wind around the pre-heated mandrel (made of stainless steel and dipped in bead release). This is wheen I decide how long or wide my bead will be. The broader the "footprint" of glass, the wider the bead.

Once I've decided on the length of the hole, I continue to add glass on the base to get the size I want.

As you can see, the shape of the bead is far from even. Now I have to melt the glass while rotating my mandrel so that the melted glass spreads itself evenly around the mandrel. If I forget to rotate, the glass will begin drooping towards the work top.

When my base bead has reached the shape and size I want, it's time to add the decorations. For this bead I choose a decoration of red dots.

This is where the stringer i pulled in the beginning comes in. By using it I can make small or even tiny dots wich would be hard using a rod.

I want to get the dots evenly sized and neatly placed on the bead. Quite tricky, actually.  I start with the midle row and work my way to the edges.

 

 Now all the dots are in place. Five rows with eight dots on each round. Now I will carefully melt them so that they stick to the bead but are notmelted flat to the surface.

 Careful, careful. I want all the dots equally raised.

 

When I'm done, I put the bead in my annealing kiln to let it cool very slowly. This is a very important part. If I didn't use a kiln the bead would cool too quickly wich might cause tiny cracks and tentions in the glass.  The bead would risk breaking.

When the bead has cooled to room temperature, I put the mandrel and the bead in water to dissolve the  bead realease a bit. Then I can pull the bead of the steal and clean the hole rom bead release residue.