Lost my Marbles

The past few weeks, I've really been enjoying making marbles. It started with my paperweight class a few weeks ago. During class, we didn't use a single mandrel. As someone who has been a beadmaker all of my glassy career, that can be rather intimidating, but I got used to it. I am looking forward to experimenting more with what I learned in class, but I have some tools on the way first for vacuum encasing.

Meanwhile, I started playing with marbles since I became comfortable with off mandrel work.

There was a bit of a learning curve.

But I finally got to the point where I wasn't having any thermal shocking, so that's always nice.

And now I'm working on finding my marble style.

There's still quite a few challenges. The main one I'm struggling with is keeping the transparent colors from getting scummy. The clarity of borosilicate clear is tough to compete with in soft glass. Maybe this will be what finally gets me to put some effort into learning boro.