Glass Bead Flame Designs: Raking Technique

Video Transcript

Again, welcome back, this is Harlan, and now we're going to take our bi-colored stringer and we will use that to make a bead design on the outer layer of a bead and then rake it. So I can demonstrate raking technique, and then finally squish that bead so I can show you a flat bead form. So first off I'm going to take and cut off the end of the bi-colored stringer. Put the hot end away, re-tune my flame. In terms of flame, the adjustment of the flame, you want to have enough clean oxygen so that the flame is not too dirty. This is a very propane-rich flame, so you can see by the orange flame that's got too much unburned fuel, and then a really hissy flame, it's generally too oxygen-rich, too oxidizing, and so we want sort of what's called a neutral flame which is right in between for most purposes. Although sometimes you want a carbon, propane-rich flame to achieve a finish that requires what's called reduction, and sometimes you want to alter colors by using an oxygen-rich flame, which is called oxidizing. To do the bead that we're going to do I'm going to take a mandrel that's already been dipped and I'm going to cook the bead release like I have done before and I will start to melt my cane and apply it onto the mandrel. Again, remembering not to pull too hard. Sometimes you can also wiggle the cane of glass. That helps the heat flow around the cane better. This is getting kind of hot, but I can get another moment of use out of it. In fact, I can let it fall like that and then just sort of heat it and tease it on if I need to with a long-nose plier. You never generally want to use tools in the flame because they will stick to the glass and then you won't know what to do. You get into trouble, of course, use the old standby which is use the flame as a cutter, but you can do that. My long nose was not in the flame, it was just at the edge. Now we can shift to another color and continue to bulk up our bead base before we put our design glass on because I want a nice, large bead this time. I want a good canvas area to do the design work that I'm going to do. This is another way to make a cylinder bead by the way, as opposed to a donut bead and then spreading it down. You just use your mandrel as a guide, and you go along and you keep applying glass on both ends, and you have an instant cylinder. It's a little bit more tapered at that end so you beef it up, wiggling and not pulling too hard, wiggling. We can make it nice and regular later on. The point right now is just to get the glass on in a sort of uniform matter, as uniform as we can. In areas of deficiency, like right there, you can beef up, and over here at this end, too. The glass wants to naturally retract from the ends so you can kind of compensate for that by adding more glass to the edge. This is a Japanese marver, nice feel. I got this one from Artco. Malcolm there, he's a nice guy and has some very interesting tools, and last time I was at his booth he sold me a book that was really good called "Art and Fear", kind of about people getting stuck and worrying about making stuff, sort of the artist's dilemma -getting started, how to go forward, "Art and Fear". I'd like to say I've read it. I only read a few pages, but it looked really good, good enough for me to recommend to you. Malcolm had that book, too. I can make a plug at this point, too, for the International Society of Glass Beadmakers. It's a wonderful outfit, ISGB.org. They have annual gatherings. The gathering this year is in Oakland, and if you're in the Bay area, don't miss the fabulous bead bizarre of the ISGB which will be held on Saturday, August the 9th, and I will have half a table there. So that's ISGB.org. The gathering is at the Oakland Marriot, this summer, 2008, but it's a wonderful outfit to belong to, and there's chapters throughout the country in most major cities, and I'm a member of the Northern California chapter of the ISGB. Alright. We have monthly meetings, usually demonstration meetings at different people's studios, and usually the 3rd Saturday of the month. Well this is sort of a misshapen cylinder bead, but it's good enough for demonstration purposes. I'm now going to take my twistie that I used, and I'm going to gradually trail it on, adjusting my distance out of the flame to compensate for the fact that the twistie is relatively thin, so it doesn't melt too easily and I can maintain good control. So this is a way to create a spiral design. You could do this with a stringer, a stringer of a different color from the base of the bead, or you could do it with a twistie or a bi-colored string or anything you could think of you could do. Melting it in and that enough, alone, could be enough for a pretty design. I'm going to kind of melt back my cylinder design because I wasn't happy with it, it was asymmetric. So you can always go back and re-melt, generally. Watch what's happening, take your time, let it sort of get into a cylinder-type shape, and kind of let it set up and get cool. The next stage is going to be to take a rake, which is this tool here, a tungsten rake. Tungsten is brittle. This might actually be stainless steel, but it will work. Tungsten has the benefit of not sticking to glass, hot glass. Then I'm going to use it to drag through molten portions of my pretty bead. You can see that alone would be a place to stop, but why stop? Why mess up a good thing? Why stop at a good thing? Why not see what other diabolical things we can do to this bead before we get it into our flat pressed shape. So the bead is now nice and firm, which is what we want. We're going to target the flame to be a little more focused. So I can heat up one area and streak it, and this is going to result in sort of a chaotic kind of patterning, and that's fine. I'm going to drag through the twistie and get kind of an interesting rake pattern. So I heat up one zone, and one zone only, and then rake, and is this steel? It is because it's sticking. So when it sticks, just kind of wiggle it. You can blow on it and it will loosen up. You might want to have some water near you to dip into and we can reverse the rake, go the other way. Wiggle it, blow, much easier with tungsten, but you can use steel. So there we have two beautiful rakes and we can keep going, alternating directions, rotating our way around the bead, and rake, wiggle, blow, dip in water, continue on. You're dragging the surface and not really the whole bead so you don't need to go out, all out on this, it's really more like just pushing that surface color, alternating the direction of the rake, just skim that surface and one more, right in the middle of those two, and we'll have a very pleasing design, hopefully. If you slip like I just did, no problem. Reheat and try again. Go and heat it, and then I promised you that we were going to try a squish, so we're going to use our big masher. When you get this melted in, round and then use the squishier, and create sort of a lollipop, lentil-shaped bead. You can also squish using two marvers, kind of like that, and there's a whole host of commercial presses on the market that look like this, which have forms in them, and you can use that also as a shaping tool to create specific shape lentils, these brass marvers. But nothing at all wrong with a simple masher. You kind of have to just practice a lot to get the hang of any of these approaches, these shaping approaches. I'm melting in now all the rake areas so they will become flush with the surface of the bead. It doesn't have to be that way, you could have left texture, but I'm choosing not to, and the secret is to get a nice, round profile even before you do your squishing if you want the bead to be nice and regular. Slope it one direction or another to affect the shaping, if you feel that's what the bead needs. Now I can go to a bushier flame, let the bead set up a little bit. Okay. Now we're going to squeeze in the squeezer, rotate it and press, and I reverse axis because this is not the parallel press tool. Every time you use a tool there's sort of a fingerprint whirl which you want to get out. You don't want that. It's known as a chill mark and you want to sort of relieve it. You want to reduce it, eliminate it, because otherwise it can cause the bead to fracture later on. So after using a cold tool on a hot piece of glass, you really need to kind of flash the flame, flash the glass area that was affected by the cold tool in the flame. We have a nice caliber bead. Do a nice kind of overall heating. Keep it rotating because it is still slumpy, and you can see the pattern coming out. It's sort of a whirled, kind of random pattern, complex, pretty, cobalt and white on a backdrop, largely of cobalt and black. Flame in the yellow, and this bead will be done. Once, twice, low glow, not too hot, you don't want it to get slumpy again. There's a lot of bead mass. The more bead mass there is, the hotter the bead stays for longer. This design is rather complex. If I had used a simply, a contrasting stringer and raked, the raking aspect would be much clearer. The lines would be not so involved and you wouldn't see so many different layers of color and shades of color. But because I chose to use the bi-colored stringer you have much more richness and less distinctiveness in the pattern. So this is a squish bead using a bi-colored stringer with demonstration of raking.

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