Using Murrine

I've been using some of those murrine in my ocean (& other) beads lately.

There's a photo in an earlier post of these starburst murrini. They get poked in the center as they're melted in, to bring the stripes together in a starburst pattern. These warm tones (yellow, orange & red) don't seem to like to be exposed to silver.

Flower murrine. These ones aren't poked, & I melt them in slowly & flatten them gently to prevent distortion.

These pale lavender murrini play nicely with the silver leaf used in the background.

Bullseye + Silver

These were done with a transparent base bead (I think I used red for one & green for the other, it really doesn't seem to matter what color), rolled in Reactive Cloud frit, then silver foil. Then black caps & stringer decor. I've been having fun with these reactions!

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.

Bullseye, Stiff Black, and Pinwheel Murrini

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.

Playing with silver has been keeping me entertained too. What I have is either thick leaf or thin foil, I can pick it up with my fingers & tear it, but have to be pretty careful & it blows away easily. I've done a lot of playing with the reactive colors & silver, but really, normal colors look pretty rad with silver too.

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.