Yesterday was a Bullseye day for me. Lately I've been having fun with BE + silver, as well as getting murrini application down. I love making cane, but getting the little slices melted flat on my beads without smearing has been a journey.
I've finally come to the conclusion that, besides skill & patience & practice & etc, a few things are really helpful with the pinwheel murrinni:
- Use Stiff Black for the stripes, and pull stringers encased with a dark transparent. It spreads less than normal black, but it still spreads. Unencased stripes tend to gray out & spread, & clear encased gets kind of weak sauce if I pull the cane remotely thin.
- Metal punties are my friend. I use the fattest normal mandrel size to both build my gather & pull it out - so one on each end. These are uncoated, & I don't worry much about the ends being pitted or icky, although I make sure to shock off any glass bits.
- The stripes seem more defined if I put them in grooves in my gather. Depending on the size of the gather, I'll use either an optic mold or a razor blade tool.
- The small molds with fewer than 8 arms/fins are totally pointless. I have a 4 in 1 & can't do crap with 3 of the molds. The 10 armed one works great, & I can always skip every other groove when laying down the stringer. I'd really love one of the metal fin type molds. Feel free to buy or make me one!
- I love how these pinwheels look with the semi-new BE opaques. Also with the warm opaques, esp. Pumpkin & and dark red. My favorite from yesterday was silvered Nougat. I'm pretty hung up on the opaque colors with black pinwheels these days.
Some of the pinwheel murrinni react to the silver - it seems to be the dark oranges & reds. They get an interesting darkening at the edges, and sometimes a bit of lightening on the inside that has a tie dye effect. I like it!
I've also gotten pretty results from using translucent stringers over silvered glass, then using the same color translucent for bead caps.
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