Fritty Ruffles Tutorial (with rose and leaf murrini)

Welcome to my second photo tutorial. An extravaganza of dodgy poorly lit indoor photography with a diddy wearing digi in all its glory.

This tutorial does not cover all the nuts and bolts of melting glass in the detail that a beginner lampworker might require but is intended merely as a rough guide for combining several techniques together in one bead. Some previous lampworking experience is implied.



I am using some of my own handpulled rose and leaf murrini chips as embellishment in these fritty ruffle beads but any handpulled or commercial murrini will work just as well. Step one is optional: Pull some 1mm stringer – this will be used for cold tweaking your leaf murrini later.



Step two: Wind a roughly tube shaped base bead which is approximately 3cm long and 2cm in diameter.



Step three: Marver the tube in to smooth tube shape, pressing down slightly to create nice dimples.



Step four: Warm the surface of your bead and then roll your base bead in frit



Step five: Melt the frit in to the surface of your bead completely



Step six: press your bead flat between two heat resistant surfaces. Make sure you do not press your bead flatter than 3 times the width of the mandrel.



Step seven: Heat one side of your bead and then snip a groove in to the hot glass with old scissors. Repeat the process on the other side of the bead, this time snipping twice.



Step eight: Warm your bead through thoroughly to round off the corners of your cut ares.



Step nine: Flatten again gently.



Step ten: Turn your fame down and spot heat where you would like to place your rose murrini.



Step eleven: Take the murrini in long handled tweezes, move your bead out of the flame and then press the murrini firmly in to the molten bead surface



Step twelve: Heat the murrini through quickly and press flat, repeat this process 3 or 4 times, flattening the murrini a little more each time. This is where the murrini application process differs slightly from applying starburst murrini, where the murrini is heated strongly and pressed only once.



Step thirteen: Repeat steps eleven through twelve for each rose or leaf murrini that you wish to apply to your bead.



Step fourteen (for leaf murrini only): Spot heat your murrini in a low flame. Remove from the flame and pull a “tip” to your leaf murrini using your cold 1mm stringer. Flame cut the stringer from your tweaked murrini.



Turning Leaf murrini - created using Red Copper Green Effetre, apply in an oxy rich flame to get the pewter finish



Spring Leaf murrini - apply in a neutral flame to avoid any unwanted reduction effects

You can find more of my beads and glasswork on Etsy and on my webshop too.
Jo x

Encased Rose Murrini Bead Tutorial

Recently I have been making some pretty rose murrini intended for encasement - they can be a bit tricky to handle so I thought a little tutorial would be a great idea.

First an apology - there are some shockingly poor quality photos, with my low tech camera, which is wearing Diddys taken under bare bulb artificial lighting of my studio. Hopefully as step by step images, they will be enough to illustrate the basic techniques that I use for this kind of bead making.



Firstly a quick snap of the pre-prepared glasswork that I will be using - nipped chips of cobalt rose murrini, some ribbon twistie, vine twistie and a bit of white latticino. I will also be using a Graphite bead roller but this method works equally well for gravity shaped beads.



Step one - Add a few wraps of glass to your mandrel



Step two - marver the glass to fit your press or bead roller. If you are making a gravity shaped bead then marver until you are satisfied with the tube shape.



Step three - add vine twistie (or frit, or enamel, or silver foil) to your tube



This is what my base bead looks like with twistie applied - I like to wrap the twistie on from underneath the tube, turning the mandrel towards me as I wrap. This makes the twistie pattern less distorted.



Step four - melt in your base decoration and marver in to a smooth tube shape again.



Step five - recheck the length of your tube against the press/roller that you are using. I like to start on the smallest size in a graduated bead shaping tool so that if my base gets worked so that it is too long I can move up to the next size. For gravity shaped bead this is not important but do pay attention to your bead ends as the neater you keep them at this stage, the neater the end result will be.



Step six - spot heat your tube where you would like to place your murrini. Pick up the murrini with tweezers and press it firmly to your base tube. If it does not stick then your base need was not hot enough. Reheat it and try again. If the murrini are 5-6mm or smaller I find that pre-warming them on a torch top marver is not necessary. Less is more, so depending on the size of your bead, two or three murrini will be plenty.



Step seven - do not put your murrini in the flame once they are firmly attached to your base. Heat some clear or light transparent glass and place dots on top of each murrini. This will stop the pattern from closing up when you introduce the murrini back in to the flame. It is a good idea to flash your bead through the top of the flame next to stop it from getting too cool and cracking.



Step eight - heat the covering dots of glass and gently flatten them. I turn the flame down low to do this.



Step nine - run some latticino in the gaps between the murrini. Again I do this in a very low flame. No need to melt the latticino flat but a good idea to turn up your torch and flash the bead through the top of the flame again at this point.



Step ten - From this point on you will not be putting your base bead back in the flame. Work close to and just behind the flame to keep your base bead warm. Add generous blobs of your transparent glass to your base bead. Make sure that you completely cover all of your raised decoration. I find that if the heated end of the encasing rod is really hot and runny before I dab less air bubbles will be created.



Step eleven - once your raised decoration is all covered add more blobs of clear so that your bead has a roughly even coverage.



Step twelve - melt in down your blobby encasement using a moderate flame. Too hot and your glass will start to run smudging all of your raised encased elements. It helps to "pat down" some of the larger blobs with a marver to get your bead roughly into shape.



Step thirteen - gently press your bead into the press or bead roller to get it roughly in shape. If you have added too much clear then move on up to the next size. If you are gravity shaping this step is not needed.



Step fourteen - add small dabs of your encasing colour where needed to fill in any dents and smooth out the shape of your bead. From this point on I stop using a bead roller and use gravity shaping to finish the bead.



Step fifteen (optional) - add further twistie decoration to the outside surface of your bead.



Step sixteen - melt down any surface decoration and finish gravity shaping your bead



Step Seventeen - heat one side of your bead at a time and tip your mandrel to let gravity create nice dimples at your bead holes.



Step Eighteen - Admire your handiwork. Flash your bead through the flame thoroughly to warm before popping it in to the kiln.

You can find my glassy offerings on Etsy at Kitzbitz and pre-prepared glasswork in my U.K. Art Glass Shop

Cheaty Bicone - tutorial by Kitzbitz Art Glass

Some more older footage from me that I have finally got around to editing. It shows one method of shaping a focal sized bicone on a hot head torch. The video shows how to build the shape up in three peices and tweak and make neat the ends and holes with my cheaty little pokey method.

Jolene

Kitzbitz Art Glass

Sleek oval focal with Shards - tutorial by kitzbitz Art Glass

Thank you to Sandy Kelly (Flowerjasper) for coming over to play
and doing a bit of filming with me.

I have wanted for a while to create a tutorial that shows an easy way to handle glass shard application as surface decoration on a focal bead. I have left them raised in this tutorial but you can go further and melt them flat. You could merge the colours of the shards in with your base bead by spot heating then twisting them at the edges with a stringer or layer other elements like dots/stringer/murrini on top of them for more a more complex result.

Dark silver plum (DSP) is a premium handpulled glass made by Effetre and it turns to the most beautiful metallic shade in an oxygen rich flme. You can get some great rainbow effects from this glass in a propane rich reduction flame too.

I think that hand blown DSP shards are simply lovely!

Jolene

Kitzbitz Art Glass

Cheaty Twistie - a beginner tutorial by Kitzbitz Art Glass

This is some footage from 2007 when I was very much still new to working with glass.
As you can see, I am working on a Hot head which is single fuel torch, propane only.
I call this the cheaty twistie method - heating only a small amount of glass to pull about an inch of twistie at a time. It is great way to get the feel of how *elastic* glass can be without feeling like you have to control with gravity a large fluid gather of glass.

Here is a bead that I made in 2007 with my cheaty twistie


It was a mile stone for me, a newbie bead I was dead thrilled with and so I hope my basic little video will help some one else along the addictive path of lampwork.

Jolene

Kitzbitz Art Glass