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.

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.