Flower Murrinni

The last time I was making murrini cane, I stumbled upon an easy way to make a pretty nice flower cane.

I was experimenting with murrini more complicated than my beloved pinwheels. I started with a base color, encased with something contrasting, encased it with something else, etc. Then I wanted pinwheel-esque stripes on the final layer.

Normally I create grooves for my stripes by stuffing my glob into an optical mold to create ridges (& valleys). This technique wasn't going to work - I had waaaay too much glass for the optical mold, & that mold pushes the glob around too much - it would smear my carefully layered colors.

So I went with the razor blade to create the grooves. I carefully heated 1 stripe at a time & pressed indentations with my razor. I added the stripes & proceeded to finish up the cane pull.

When I cut the cane to check the cross section, I got a nice surprise: the grooves I created with the razor tool had pushed the layers of glass towards the center, creating a perfect flower. This was very exciting because I've made crazy multi-part flower cane & this took a fraction of the time.

The colors I used for the first cane were kind of weird for flowers, so I repeated the trick with a yellow center, then some opaque peach, then french vanilla. Then I creased, striped the creases with clear & then cased the whole thing in a thin layer of clear. The slices look like pretty kick ass flowers for taking less than 30 mins to pull.



I tried them out on a test bead today, so next time I'm at the studio I can see how it worked. I'm not very confidant in my ability to use murrini yet - we'll see.