The Making of Beads
You start with a metal rod called a mandril which is covered in chemicals that keep the glass from sticking.
It's a bit like rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time - as you have to keep the mandril orangey hot but not too hot, while you get the tip of your glass rod hot enough to reach firey melting point.
So many things to keep in mind - if the mandril gets too cold (as I quickly learned) the chemicals can flake off and then the glass bead would be stuck permanently to the rod. At the same time, the glass can burn if too hot so you're watching the colors to keep it away from the base of the torch because the colors will change if they get too hot. If you warm the glass too quickly, the stuff shatters and spits glass off too - all away from you in the direction of the flame, but disconcerting nonetheless.
By the way, those protective glasses are just as much for protection as they are for being able to see.
I took most of the rest of these photos by pointing the camera lens into the glasses - without them most of what you saw was a big ball of orange flame.
Once the glass is hot enough, you bring it off the flame to touch it to the mandril, which you spin under the glass. The glass sticks, and then flows...
Eventually, if you're good, it turns into a disk-like spiral.
Now it's a question of rotating the mandril so that the glass flows and melts into a rounder shape.
Flame, spin, cool, spin...spin spin spin... lalalala
The glass wants to be round, so you spin and let gravity work for you.
Patience is hard. So is keeping your arms even and figuring out whether the bead is even yet.
The weirdest thing about working with glass is that you never really can see what your colors are until 5 hours later after the kiln is done doing it's thing.
This bead, for example, is made of blue glass. It's nicely rounding here - cool it too much and it'll crack. Cracking can be fixed by turning the whole thing into a molten ball again, but if you've got a bunch of design work done on it then that can change the whole way the bead turns out.
At this point, you have a basic bead. You can put it glowing red into the kiln where it'll bring the temperature down at the right pace, or you can choose to keep going.
Here's the kiln where the beads go when you're done.
There's a little door at the bottom there that resembles a mail slot and you put your lightly glowing bead on it's rod in through there.
The kiln's purpose is not, in fact, for melting in this case, but for cooling.
It makes sure the beads temperatures are taken down in a controlled fashion.
If you don't leave it in the kiln long enough, or you get impatient and try to peek too early, the glass will cool too quickly and this will happen.
The next thing lunesse showed me how to do was encasing a bead.
In this process, you start with your basic bead (here we've got our blue bead going) which is still hot from the last step, and you let it cool enough that it won't melt and flow but not so cool that it cracks.. so almost but not quite glowing.
This time, you take a transparent glass rod, here it's clear, and you touch to the bead and spin the mandril, covering it in the encasing color.
(Note the gorgeous violet color that the bead took on as it was cooling. Man, it's amazing how weird the colors are - as this too is not the color of the glass we used. Sometimes though, it would be wonderful to capture the color while it was hot for the actual bead!)
Spin spin spin. There's pretty much rarely a time you're not spinning the bead.
Encasing a bead makes a lens over the design underneath, which makes the colors pop out and adds shine.
It's also what makes glass beads appear to be floating in liquid.
Next, I asked her to show me how she does the crazy scrolly designs on the beads.
This step involves what's called "a stringer," which is a super skinny rod of glass that you can either buy premade or make yourself. She showed me how to make stringers too.
Because the stringer is so thin, you don't flame it directly the way you can a regular rod.
Essentially, you color on the bead.
It's not as easy as it sounds though. In fact, to be blunt, it's really fricka-fracka-frelling hard.
Contrary to instinct, you're not supposed to move the stinger. Once you touch the bead with the glass, you make the designs by moving the bead underneath. And you have to maintain the tension or you lose the thread, keeping it not too hot and not too cold, keeping the bead itself from getting too hot because if it starts to flow it'll melt into your scroll design, and if it gets too cool, it'll crack.
All this while trying to make your design go where you want it to go.
FUN! ...but really, really hard.
Damn she's good. She was complaining the whole time about how "uneven" blablablabla this scrollwork was... when I tried it my stringer went all over the place. It was fun, but woa...hard to control!
Then you flame it on there - some at least, is necessary to keep it from popping off.
But you can also choose to flame it down until it rounds out to be even with the bead surface.
I kept thinking Tolkien lines at this part.
Pop! Into the kiln we go.
Here she was showing me how to make a stringer for a bead I wanted to try. You take a glass rod, beat the end until it becomes a huge molten blob of lava, and then you pinch it with tweezers and PULL. Hopefully, you do it at an even pace and it ends up evenly spread out, and then you fire and pinch off the end.
This gets really fun when you can make crazy stringers too. Here she showed me how to take two glass rods, smush them together, and then spin and pull apart.
That leaves you with a candycane zebra-striped stringer that will allow you to make all sorts of crazy stuff.
And yet another method. Here, she took a glass rod and heated the end, then dabbed the blobby tip into a piece of silver leaf, which looks like ultra-fine aluminum foil.
Put that back into the fire of the torch and you can already see some of the chemical reactions starting around the edges where the foil meets the glass. This got pinched and turned into yet another stringer, and I got to use the crazy zebra-striped stringer and these stringers and make dots and melt it all to make some of the wackier beads towards the later afternoon.
Things got a little nutty toward the end there. hee.
There's work-in-progress for some of the zanier stuff in the afternoon. I can't remember which bead this was as the colors all look red/orange/black when hot... maybe green? with the black and white striped stringer and the silver-foil stuff....
And then it got encased in a layer of transparent glass and it's not as bumpy towards the end...
No idea which one this was. We'll have to wait until they're out of the kiln before we can see the results.
Here's how a hollow bead is made. You start with that disk...
Oh! Remember how I said that so much of this work is guessing about colors? That clear looking rod she's using - that's going to be a red bead.
And then you make a second one adjacent to it.
So you've got to do this perfectly straight, twice, at the same size and the same width. Holy hell. No wonder these are expensive.
Now you have to spin it AND push the tips towards each other, gently so as not to have the whole thing collapse into itself, evenly.... until eventually the tips touch...
Now you've got a single funky looking bead that you "just" (haha) have to spin regularly and evenly...
The trapped air inside the now-single bead starts to expand in the heat.
Magic!
Then I asked her to put scrolly designs on the red bead with black stringer.
haha - there's that flying-color-blind action going, as the barely cooling-red glass is now appearing black at this temperature, and the stringer she's working with is black too.. I didn't mean to make it that challenging for her!
And a once she's got the scribbles on there, she'll do a last pass through the fire before placing it in the kiln with all our other beads.
At 5 or so, I had finally finished my last wacky piece that is going to be a honkin' huge bead of pinks and greens and swirls and craziness ... and we decided to call it quits because we'd completely lost track of time (or at least I had) and had not eaten or drank anything the whole time we'd been in there. Looks like there's what - 9? 10? beads sitting in that kiln? That's not including the one that cracked and the one that I scraped the glass into the bead chemical on the rod which we threw out knowing that the glass would never come off the rod anyway.
We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see how they turned out.
Edited to add:
I got the hollow bead she made here and made it into this pendant necklace