Welcome to my little Lampwork studio, let's go on a tour!
Torches
I currently work between two small Torches (aka lamps). My trusty old hothead which I worked on near exclusively for 10 years, and my minor torch which allows me to work much quicker.
The hothead runs on gas only whereas the minor runs on gas and oxygen giving a much hotter flame. The minor is also more adjustable allowing anywhere from a tiny pinpoint flame allowing precision work to a huge flame for large pieces.
Glass I work mostly with 'soft' glass, this being glass with a lower melting temperature. Over the years I have become a bit of a collector of discontinued glass allowing me to build up a huge variety of colours, although sometimes the rarity of the glass can certainly put me off using it!
I
have a small collection of harder borosilicate glass which is great for making marbles and sculptural work.
I also like to recycle glass and have a collection of coloured glass bottles outside my studio that I like to break up to make beads and sculptures from.
Kilns
I have two kilns in which beads are 'cooked' after making. In order to ensure beads do not sporadically crack while using / wearing over time they go through an annealing process to help make the glass more stable.
While items are still made of glass and run the risk of breakage with knocks and drops, if taken care of will last a lifetime and more.
This process is often missed in cheap production glass making and I have seen the results of the terrible cracks and breaks where not annealed. When purchasing cheap lampwork beads this is likely the case.
There is a ridiculous snobbery I see over and over ''beads are properly annealed, straight from the flame to a digitally controlled kiln'' and such like. Glass is annealed or it is not, the process behind it does not matter as long as it has been done correctly.
Kilns can be manually controlled, be batch annealed (cooled by way of cooling beads or blanket) and kilned later and the results will be the same.
I did a number of experiments many years ago for a website using a polariscope to show the stress in beads before and after annealing and by different methods.
I will show the results again in an upcoming blog.
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