More Bullseye + Silver

For some reason working with the combination of Bullseye glass & silver seems so adventurous & uncharted. Unlike the more widely used 104 coe glass, Bullseye's reactions with silver isn't very well documented. At least not that I'm aware of. It feels like a playful experiment working with these materials, with no rules & just a few vague guides.

It all started for me when Bullseye came out with Reactive Clear & Reactive Cloud. These special run rods are now standard in sheet, so its easy to get ahold of this stuff. Plus, while looking up those links, I noticed that this stuff comes in frit! Who hoo!

Anyways, this reactive glass caught my eye because I love Bullseye for many reasons, but I also love the silver loaded glass available in 104 coe. One serious benefit to this reactive glass - it costs the same as any other Bullseye rod.

I've been playing around with this stuff for awhile now, and will hopefully get photos up soon. One drawback to the "playing around" approach, is that I never remember which stringer or short I used, and since most of my glass is unlabeled, I probably won't be able to change that. That's one of the reasons I'm trying to document my glass habit - so I have some chance of keeping track of what I'm doing!

Today I started off by pulling some transparent & translucent stringer in a variety of blues. Then I'd either make a bead with the reactive cloud or put the cloud over another color of base bead. Next some non-reactive stringer decoration, melt in, roll in silver, more stringer, melt in & see what happened. I keep the oxy up to keep the shiny metallics on the surface, rather than the drab earthtones from a more neutral flame.

Most of the time I can't resist adding a few pinwheel murrini at this point. I love those things. The warm opaque colors seem to seriously react to the silver, which I'm not loving as much as I thought in the last post. I'd prefer for them to stay true to their bright original colors, but they tend to go muddy. It still looks cool with the black pinwheel spokes, just a much more muted effect than I'd like.

One style that was appealing to me today began with a dark transparent base. Some are dark green & some a vibrant blue. Too bad the rods are unlabeled! I made the base bead, drew on it with reactive clear stringer, melted smooth, rolled in silver leaf, then added stringer decoration with a transparent stringer before melting it all smooth. When I'm careful & lucky enough, I can encase some of the shiny silver leaf without it burning into the glass, which looks like little gems encased in the bead. The colors revealed by the second round of stringer work were interesting but kind of dark. Variations caused by the layer of reactive stringer decor added depth. The silver burned into the surface of the bead can be brought to shiny reflectiveness with an oxidizing flame. These looked pretty amazing for being fairly simple beads with no expensive special glass.