Twistie cored focal bead with hearts

I tend to make these beads on 4mm mandrels, turns out they are great as a center piece for beaded kumihimo type bracelets.

Equipment and glass that I've used:

• round cavity graphite bead roller
• graphite paddle
• steel dental pick
• parallel mashers
• clear glass
• CiM Marachino
• Effetre white commercial stringer
• goldstone ribbon twistie cane
• fine black stringer

Step 1
Make a tube bead out of clear or pale transparent glass that fits the cavity on your 1 size down from the size you would like to make.

Step 2
Encase your clear core with a layer of CiM Maracshino.

Step 3
Melt the Maraschino glass in and round off the edges in your graphite roller.

Step 4
Wrap a spiral of twistie cane around your Maraschino Core. I've used a black edged goldstone ribbon twistie here but you can use whatever twistie cane you like to make best.

Step 5
Wrap a second spiral of twistie cane around your core bead laying it between the wraps of the first spiral.

Step 6
Melt in your twistie wraps carefully and marver them in smooth with a graphite paddle.

Step 7
Spot heat your bead and make some twists with a fine black stringer to add interest.

Step 8
Encase your bead with a layer of clear glass. I have used Effetre 006 clear here.

Step 9
Melt in your encasing layer and smooth off your bead in the roller cavity.

Step 10
Add more clear glass at the edges and around the centre of your bead. By doing this you are ensuring that you will make neat puckered bead holes and are bulking out your bead to fill the next size up cavity in your roller.

Step 11
Melt in your clear glass and shape your bead in your roller.

Step 12
Add 4 or 5 largish white dots close to the bead holes on both sides of your bead and melt them in flat

Step 13
Add large dots of CiM Maraschino over your white dots and melt them in flat.

Step14
Spot heat each dot in turn and rake your dots into hearts using a dental pick.

Step 15
Repeat the heating and raking process on the other side of your bead.

Step 16
Slowly melt your bead smooth again and shape in your roller cavity.

Step 17
Pull some extra fine white stringer, I heat the end of the commercial stringer and anchor it to the end of my mandrel to pull out fine stringer as I need it.

Step 18
Wrap the fine stringer randomly around the centre of your bead and melt it smooth.

Step 19
Heat your bead until glowing and then press it in a parallel press or handheld mashers.

Step 20
Flame polish away any chill marks created when you pressed your bead and pop it in your kiln to anneal.

Have a great day, Jolene x

My Etsy and My eBay
and Frit N Chips lampwork supplies.

Making a simple two colour twistie cane

A quick guide to how I make a simple two tone twistie using a mandrel and 104 glass punty to pull the twistie cane out. First heat up an uncoated mandrel directly in your torch flame.

Next wrap 1 to 2 cm of your bare mandrel with small wraps of your base colour - in this case I am using CiM Peace which I find much stiffer in relation to Effetre white and it is my go to white for twistie making.

Wrap a second layer of glass over your foundation layer. Some people build their twistie gather extending out from the last few mm of an uncoated mandrel and have the majority of the gather off mandrel but I prefer to use the mandrel for stability through the entire core of my gather.

Keep on building up the layers until you have a gather size that you are comfortable with. Start small and build larger gathers as you confidence grows.

Next marver your gather smooth which will make it easier to judge where to add your stripes of accent glass and will make the gather pull out evenly.

Keep your gather warm behind the flame and swipe on generous lines of your top stripe colour. In this tutorial I am using Reichenbach Dense Black which tends to stay crisp and dense in tone when stretched diluted. Avoid Reichenbach Dense Black if you are looking for organic spreading and webbing from your twistie - use fine lines (added with stringer rather than a full rod) of CiM Hades or Effetre intense black instead.

I like to add 4 or 5 stripes of the accent glass over my base colour to give the illusion of a really tight twist.

Keep you gather warm behind the flame and prepare a chunky maria of CoE 104 clear glass for your punty. It wasn't possible to get a photo of this part of the process as I had both hands full!

Some people like to use a second mandrel, aluminium chopsticks or even a rod of boro glass as their punty - all of these work well and the choice what kind of handle to use to help you pull down your gather is entirely up to you. I use 104 clear as I use all of the tail ends of my twistie canes to make Amoeba beads for Beads of Courage UK (tutorial for that tomorrow).

Attach your CoE 104 maria (second mandrel/chopsticks/boro rod) to your gather and heat until the stripes are well melted in and the whole mass is fluid and glowing to the core.

Edit to add: aim all of the heat at at the gather and not the maria, especially on the bushy flame of a HH torch. If you heat the soft punty rod that will pull out instead of the gather which is why lot's of people would go for chopsticks or a mandrel to punty up.

Remove the whole gather from the flame and begin to slowly twist both gather mandrel and punty whist pulling the two further apart very slowly. As you pull your cane you will see and feel the twisted cane "set". At this point you can stop twisting the punty and twist the mandrel only, twisting it faster and pulling harder to get a long length of even straight twistie cane.

Place the twistie on a heat proof surface to cool and cut the mandrel and punty from your twistie with rod nippers. Leave the maria ends to cool and dunk the mandrel in a water jar to cool it. You can always repunty the remainder of a gather and go for a second pull if your gather is too large for your arm span once reduced.



Jolene x

Frit N Chips lampwork supplies and Kitzbitz Art Beads

A rainbow of twistie for Betsy

for Betsy too, originally uploaded by kitzbitz art glass by Jolene.

A quick blog and run from me via Flickr this morning - it shows a selection of twistie that I recently made for a customer on Etsy. I really like this picture even though it is just a quick snap that I sent for approval before posting as it makes me think of some kind of alternative rainbow.....now where did I put that pot of gold?

Frit N Chips

Mini Mo' Club June 2011 - Sea Heather

After taking a full year off from melting glass during pregnancy and after my son Ethan was born, I am very excited to be back to work and creating lovely little Mini Mo' packages again. This selection of glasswork for June is the very first collection for the the Mini Mo' Club this year.

The main colourway for Sea Heather Mini Mo is CiM Lapis and Effetre Dark Turquoise, two of my absolute favourite glass colours. I have teamed up elements of Sea Heather with CiM Crocus in my first test bead set and really put the murrini through its paces. On the left you can see Sea Heather murrini both encased and as a surface embellishment. The murrini in the round bead at the fore of this picture has been melted flat, spot heated and the twisted to form a delicate swirl.

I have encased the murrini in the focal bead for this set. First I made a small tube bead core from CiM Crocus and attached two murrini, one on each side. Next I heated the murrini gently until it domed and then used a brass pokey tool to indent the center of each murrini. I heated a gather of Lauscha soft clear glass and spot encased over the murrini fully to trap and air bubble and protect the murrini from smearing. Neat I put down some twistie in between the murrini for interest and then spot encased and melted te encasing layer smooth and marvered in to shape.

The three murrini visible inside my Sea Heather focal Bicone have each been treated differently, One was attached and immediately encased, one was melted partially flat and then encased. The third was melted completely flat and then encased.



Pictured above is one of my test bead sets for the Sea Heather shards. I've used CiM Gunmetal with is pewter patina as a contrast to the glossy aqua colour of these pretty enamelled shards.

In this large organic focal I have used a fairly substantial piece of shard and covered big section of surface area of the bead, dusting with some white enamel to add interest and texture just before garaging.

Here are all of the Mini Mo's for June together in their pretty packaging.

As an extra special treat I also made a second murrini pull, Atlantic, to send with the June Mini Mo's as thank you to my Mini Mo' Club members.You can see it both as surface decoration and also under deep encasement in my Pink Atlantic bead set shown here.



Jolene x

Frit N Chips lampwork supplies and Kitzbitz Art Beads

Twistie eye candy

twists-blue, originally uploaded by kitzbitz art glass by Jolene.

I am getting the hang of blogging directly from Flickr - very handy, especially as I like my blog to be picture rich and not so very wordy. Here are some yum-scrum pics of my hand pulled twistie cane - bright and full of potential for lampwork bead beautifulness.

Kitzbitz

A couple of shiny ones

I have had a bit of a break from bead making, and come back to it with all the more passion because of the rest. These are the first beads I have made in over two months - using techniques that I learnt in my master class with Andrea Guarino in April this year.



CiM Simply Berry with Double Helix Aurae and some complex twistie made with Effetre Opal Yellow. I have also made the Murrini with these three glasses.



I cannot be sure as to the name of this lush, green silver rich reduction glass, tho I suspect it is GT Glassworks Green Envy. This class turned up in my studio as part of job lot and I have been hoarding it because I love it so much.

I thought I would feel rusty - but the love of melting glass made me forget I had ever been away!

Kitzbitz

Slytherin - Rockin' for twistie

Just spent a productive hour in my shed pulling twistie from Slytherin, one of the newest CoE 104 glass colours to hit the U.K from CiM.

This is the paddle pic for Slytherin from CiM - divine looking isn't it!



The intensity of this transparent colour makes the rods look virtually opaque not what I was expecting at all. It is a very stiff glass, but does not pit, spark or boil even in a very hot flame.

So I pulled a few variations of twistie in combination with CiM Peace (from right to left) encased striped twistie, striped twistie, tightly twisted ribbon cane with a thin partial encasement of Slytherin and lastly loose ribbon cane with a thick partial encasement of Slytherin.



The dense pigmentation in this glass lends itself well to creating encased striped twistie (far left below) - perfect for complex and subtle vine work on florals maybe. The striped twistie without encasement gave me a surprising result when I came to make my test beads - a thin reaction line on the Peace, midway between the main stripes of Slytherin (second from left below).





Of the ribbon cane twistie I much prefer the lightly encased version (above center) which again shows a reaction line on the Peace. The loosely twisted ribbon when used in my encased test beads shows again just how intense this colour is (abovefar left).



My conclusion......A little of this glass goes a very long way.

Jolene