It isn’t easy being green!

It isn’t easy being green! - That’s an old saying from my Girl Scout camp days, and it certainly applies to being “environmentally” green as well. I love the idea of reusing and recycling, so I’ve been saving my pretty colored wine bottles with the intention of using them to make beads.

The first difficulty in using recycled glass is getting the glass into a usable form. First I use my glass cutter to score the bottle in hopes I can break it into usable glass strips. Let me tell you, it is much easier to score a line on flat glass than a round bottle. When cutting flat glass you tap the glass from beneath the score to get the score to “run”. Of course with a bottle the underside is inside the bottle making this impossible, so instead I just whacked the bottle with a hammer. This results in some strips, some chunks, and lots of shards flying everywhere.

After making a big mess someone suggested to me I break the bottles in a bag in order to contain the shards. (DUH, why didn’t I think of that?) So now I break my bottles in old pillowcases, which I also use to store the pieces.

Next comes the melting. I think some people melt the glass and pull rods. I’m too lazy to do this, so I wind the beads directly from the end of the melting strip. Depending on the width of the strip it can be a little tricky to melt and wind, and the glass tends to thermal shock and crack easily. Of course with a little practice this gets much easier, but it definitely has a different feel to it than working with glass rods.

The next challenge is design. Because the glass is of unknown and possibly variable COE, you can’t mix colors, and I don’t even dare mix glass from 2 different “identical” bottles. So creativity is limited to shape, texture and the use of metals like gold foil and copper mesh.

I enjoy making beads from bottle glass, but they really are much more work than using lampworking rods. So while the glass is essentially free, the amount of labor involved is increased, so I don’t think there is any real cost savings to using recycled glass. But I do like the idea of helping to save the planet, so I plan to make an effort to make more recycled glass beads. I’m looking forward to trying to come up with more interesting single color designs, and if nothing else, it gives me another excuse to enjoy an occasional bottle of wine with friends

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!

Studio Cleanup Miniseries

Are you a frugal beadmaker? I admit it I kind of am. I just hate waste, so I like to make the best use of all my materials. I like to melt my rods down to the last inch or so, so my “shorts” are really short. Short enough that I probably should throw them away, but instead I save them and find uses for them. Sometimes they become frit, sometimes I hold them with pliers, melt them and pull them into stringers or use them to create twisty canes.

When I did my last studio clean up I unearthed a bunch of very short bits of dichro strips; pieces that must have thermal shocked off when they were introduced into the flame. I hated to discard them but they were too small to do much of anything with until I thought a minute and had an idea.

I melted a nice paddle of transparent glass, stuck the piece of dicro on it, heated it up and gave it a twist. Voila’ I had a nice twistie, with the just enough dichro to give the right amount or sparkle to my beads.

I layered my twisties on some transparent beads with some enamels, did a few surface twists and I had a nice little miniseries, all inspired by my desire to not waste my snippets of dichro.

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!

Experiment! More on Encasing Red Glass.

I guess I never got the memo. So you can’t encase red? A while back Otter blogged about listening to the advice of other lampworkers, but then experimenting and learning on your own. The example he gave was encasing transparent red; he had been told it couldn’t be done, but he successfully did it anyway.

I have not had opportunity to take classes, and while I do read tricks and tips on internet forums, my main way of learning is through experimentation. I like red, and as you can see I encased it… and pressed it and cooled it in my crockpot of vermiculite then batch annealed it….and here it is months later, completely intact. I guess I’m glad I never got the memo about not being able to encase transparent red.

On the other hand, a while back I encased a brown opaque with transparent red. I really, really liked the shade of red this combo created. But sadly, most of them cracked! So now I’m phobic about encasing brown with red… but is it the brown or the red that’s the problem. I don’t know, as I haven’t done the proper experiments to determine, which glass, if any, is the problem.

Maybe it wasn’t the glass, maybe it was me and the way I was working that day. So I won’t be sending out any memos. I’m with Otter, I think experimentation is the best way to find what works for you!

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!

Chaos and Creativity

Look at this! My torch station, actually clean! I suppose I should have taken a picture of my normal chaos, but I didn’t think to do that. Oh well, it may have been too frightening anyway! Every time I clean my workbench I swear, cross my heart and hope to die, pinky promise, that I will start working neatly.

You know, actually planning what I want to work on ahead of time. Taking out just those colors I plan to work on, pulling stingers and making canes, then making those carefully planned beads. When I’m finished, I’ll put away my rods, and wipe off my work station, so I can have a clean start for my next torch session.

I’ve just described the dream world in my head. My reality is that I often have a plan for a bead, I start to create it, then something goes awry; I misplace a dot or mess up with a stringer, then my bead takes on a new life and becomes something I never meant it to be. Sometimes these “mistake creations” give me great new ideas for future beads or end up being serendipitously wonderful! (And sometimes they end up being, well, UGLY!) So despite my plans I end up working on something totally different.

But what about that apre torch clean up? Somehow that rarely happens. Most of my torch sessions are at night, and I when I peek at the clock and see it’s midnight, and I know I have to be up early for work the next day, I loose my inspiration to clean. So much for my great intentions to actually clean after each session. Of course I could clean before starting, but I’m usually too excited to get working to actually clean. The torch usually wins over the dustpan! And so it goes, until the point where my workbench becomes a glass littered wreck, and then the chaos starts to get to me. I then begin telling myself that I MUST clean before torching, but I still don’t actually do it. Soon I start stressing out about the mess, and at some point it starts to zap my creativity. Sometimes it causes me to avoid my studio, because I know I really need to clean, and I just don’t want to do it, because it’s become such a big job. I hit this point last week. I realized my studio was causing me more anxiety than happiness, to the point where I was avoiding making beads. So I kicked myself in the rear and spent a large chunk of my weekend in cleaning mode. I feel so much better now that I have a usable work surface again! I’m looking forward to resuming torching. The burning question is “Will I mend my evil ways and start cleaning after every session?” I have such good intentions, but suspect I will fail once again. But you never know. Hopefully I will take advantage of my creativity before my world turns to utter chaos again. I will keep you posted!

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!

Evolutionary Ends

Are you sick of my writing about my travels with twisties? I think I may have hit the end of my evolutionary road. I started playing out playing with reactive twisties, which led me to my “Ornamentive” beads, then on to playing with gravity to carefully stretch and move the twisted glass down the bead.

This weeks beads are a bit more of the same, but rather than trying to precisely control the movement of the glass, I allowed it to flow more randomly. When doing the final shaping of these beads I chose to make a tube shape, because I thought a structured geometric shape would add balance to the more flowing, informal nature of patterned part of these beads.

I think these are my favorite twisty beads, they really appeal to my organic side. Because of the columnar shape of these beads I’ve dubbed them my Monolith series. Series? Me? Well, I have made at 8 or 10 of these, which for me constituted a series!

Linda beads and blogs from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah!