Universe / Planet Marbles

One of the very first things I bought when I started lampworking almost 6 years ago, was fine silver leaf. 25 little sheets of it, and guess what I still have laying around.

Well, this week I made good use of some of them and made these universe marbles.

Click for a larger version.
These marbles are so lovely in the sun.

The three smaller ones are thinly encased, and I'd like to try one with a thicker layer of clear next time. It is fun to see the center 'landscape' bend under the clear, and a thicker layer would magnify even more. I might be able to make mountains or craters or perhaps even clouds. Some sort of structure in any case.

The two bigger ones have a spiralling indentation under the surface. They are not too tight, but I think people call them tornado beads, when using this technique for beads.

Those two marbles are my biggest ones yet, but I gave the very biggest to a new friend, and forgot to measure it first, so I can't say exactly how big it was. I any case, the spiralling technique adds quite a bit of clear and makes the marble grow considerably from its base size.

As for the roundness - I'm getting closer every time :)

More New Marbles

I'm rather fond of this one. It looks like a single coral sending out its egg into the ocean. It's a circle of SIS with inward spikes, on a purple frit background. I'm thinking it should be possible to make a group of spawning corals, though they might well lose their circular shape during implosion.

Two more in pink, a flower and a spiral, both implosions too. They are both quite low in the marble, the spiral most, which makes it hard to see properly, even in person.

I'm afraid I still need to work on my roundness. Apparently I don't pay enough attention to the roundness, while I do remove chillmarks carefully. I probably should punty several more times than I do, in fact, I probably should make myself a very simple marble and punty it over and over just to practice.

I still worry about dropping the marble, and I definately do not master any kind of cold connection yet. I make my hot connections real skinny, so there is only a little bit to melt flush in the end, but of course this makes it very easy to get the punty too hot and droopy while working on the marble.

Well, there is always Practise, Practise, Practise :)

More marbles (purplish)

I made some more marbles! :) 

This is a big one, more than 1" across. My vortexs seem to grow uncontrolably while I build them. This one, like my first vortex, is without a solid backside colour. I rather like it that way. It is also slightly transparent, since I didn't cover it completely in purple frit. I like that too.

It doesn't really show, except when you hold it, but the center of this one apears so deep it wouldn't fit inside the marble. It is very cool.
And check out that bubble I planted in the depth of the vortex. I thought it would go round as I finished the backside, but no, it has kept a neat pointy spaceship form. Vrooooom!

I am keeping this one, in my pocket for now, because even though the lens magnifies like crazy, it is still not smooth enough to live with somebody else.


Front

Next time I'll see if I can get some light in there.


Back


This next one has a name. Oh I know, you don' believe me, since I never ever name anything. Even my teddy bear I had as a child went without a name for some 13 years. But this marble has a name and got it as soon as I picked it out of my kiln. It's a Fairy Flower. Yeps. Because it's kind of like a flower, but not really. 

Two experiments went into that. The white center dots that melted into each other and didn't spike much, and the skinny purple things flabbing in the breeze. Those were made by pushing line-shapes into the back of the frit and imploding them. I expected to see raised lines, but no, I got skinny pointy bits.

I covered the back in white, because the purple frit keeps staying on the surface and devitrifying and looking really bad. Next time I'll dip once more in the frit before I cover it for a purple background. It will be lovely.

I also made another marble, but it photographs incredibly bad, so no picture of that. I am only mentioning it (without a picture) because a strange and interesting thing happened when I imploded.

I made a stringer from dipping clear in goldstone fine frit. It has a lovely minty blue colour, but since it is on clear it is very transparent and doesn't show up well in pictures.

In the marble I made 2 circles of bubbles and a single one in the center, then dottet them with the stringer. Then, to avoid too much boiling of the goldstone, I covered the dots in clear. I had expected the stringer dots to rise up, like petals and dots usually do, but they all stayed mostly flat. Then the outer dots curved downwards on the outer rim away from the center, following the side of the marble towards the back.

None of the colours I have imploded so far has done anything like that. I am sure it is because it was mostly clear and with hardly any difference in viscosity. Fascinating. I'll have to see if I can duplicate it some time.

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This is obviously not a marble. It is a picture from my garden, where the appletrees are blooming like crazy! The cherry trees have already lost their petals, but they were lovely while it lasted. Just to let you know that spring is here, and it is fantastic!

Love,

Lene

Imploding is fun!

After my first marble session I realised that for now, the implosions was the most fun for me to make, so I made some more.

This one is my favourite so far. The white petals have a really nice curve, the whole flower is halfway up through the marble, not just at the bottom, and I even got some green leaves in below. They have a different shape than the petals, which I like because I did it on purpose :)

Also the flower goes straight up, and while it is still not a perfectly round marble, it wants to stand the right way up, all by itself. Yay!

These are the 3 new ones I got made. No cracks at all this time, no soot, and I also took care to make the surface nice and smooth and free of chillmarks so you clearly see what's inside.

The baby-blue one has been squished on top. I think I make my marias too flat to begin with, and definately squished this one too much while imploding. I got it uncentered from the beginning too, but I like the melting part so I finished it anyway.

This one I tried to make with an additional row of petals, which worked out fine, but the mass of flowing glass turned sideways while imploding, and it is topheavy too, so ... not so fabulous either.

But I love it, I do, and I want to learn more. The whole implosion process is intriguing and I look much forward to trying it again. I think I may have to make yet another list of 'things to try out', because my mind is sizzling with ideas.

Love,
Lene

My first ROUND marbles!

Ooh, I love my infinite rim mould!

Yes, I decided to go ahead and get one, since all I have heard about it is praise and goodness. Isn't it delicious and pretty and SHINY :)

And it works great too, these are my very first rounded marbles.

From the top left:
a spectacularly cracked flower marble,
a large-ish vortex in pastels and pixiedust, slightly cracked and with a ring of soot,
a slightly cracked planet marble,
an octopus experiment with a very flat 'face',
another planet with several mysteriously flat areas,
and finally the best of the bunch, a white flower with just a bit of soot at the top of the lens.

It seems perhaps I should start out a bit smaller, or perhaps by reading/watching a tutorial :)

I am not unaccustomed to keeping large masses of glass warm (large for beads anyway), but I have never used punties before. I dropped the first marble tree times (the cracked planet), but after that it went well. It is a bit of a distraction though, as is using a new tool, which may well have kept my attention from keeping the heat up.

But I am very happy with them, in anticipation of better results with practice :)

Love,
Lene

My first implosions!

Ooh did I ever have fun getting up at 3 a.m. on friday to torch before work!
Thursday evening I had re-discovered the YouTube channel of Florin Voicu. He may only have postet 5 videos, but the how-tos are making me happy.

I had first seen the one with the spider, but as he says in the beginning, it is probably best to start with something simpler if you haven't made an implosion before. So I looked at his flower tut too and made my own mix of the two flowers.

The two first ones are trash, but this is no. 4. It has tree rows of 5 blue petals and 3 white stamens for the pollen in the center.

Here is a sideview, and yeah, I know it is completely wonky, but that was not part of the challenge this time. Just to implode.

This is no. 3. I thought it looked kind of okay, so I attached a length of clear rod to it and voilá, I have a wonky hairstick :)

I wasn't sure the rod would survive coming from room temperature and getting thrown into 520 Celsius, but it did. Yay! This one has 2 rows of 4 petals, and the center stamen of 3 dots.

And speaking of pollen, check out the beauty of the little buggers over at wikipedia :)

This was so much fun I may have to get myself a marble mould. That infinite rim mould sounds awfully alluring right now ...

Love,
Lene