More Marble Adventures

So in my last entry I mentioned that I've been playing around with marbles. Since then, I've made quite a few more and I'm feeling more confident in my off mandrel work.

Here is some transparent blue over a core of white with silvered ivory linework. I've etched this to give it a glowing seaglass kind of look. I really love this glowing effect.

 This one was my first marble with a new larger marble mold. I think I might have gotten a little excited about the large canvas to work with and I completely covered it with lines.

 Transparent teal encased around a white core with sky blue linework. I really love the linework in this one. One side has a heart and the other a star. It feels like happy sidewalk chalk from childhood.

Here is my most recent one from the weekend. It's the largest one I've mad so far at 27mm. I tried combining some traditional boro styles of marbles with my stringer work. So, one side is a vortex, while the backing has been embellished with stringer that I left slightly raised. 

This vortex style feels like a slight turning point for me because of the clear. The marbles that I haven't been showing or selling aren't quite meeting my standards because of the clarity of the clear glass. Most people who work with effetre know that the clear often has quite a few bubbles and scratches in it. When dirt and oil get caught in these scratches on the glass rod, it turns into "scum" on the finished glass product. There's nothing physically wrong with it, but when you are trying to create a clear lens to showcase and magnify, that scum and bubbles can be distracting.

The marble above  has been made with larger diameter clear rods that I've cleaned very well using pickle. Pickle is a very mild acid that metal workers often use to clean the metal before soldering. The larger diameter clear also helps because less surface area of the glass rod is exposed to the elements.

I'm still working on finding the best clear for me to make marbles with. Next up to try is large diameter rods of the newly formulated super clear. After that, probably double helix Zephyr. 

To be continued...

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.