Flameworking

So I signed up for a three day course in flameworking because when I see people doing it I think "that looks cool". Yesterday was day one. It is freaking hard! The booklet said "beginner to intermediate" and when I called I said "so, if I have never done this before, this is ok?" and they said yes. Naturally, there are no other beginners in the class. AND one woman in there has beads in the same book that the instructor has items in. Does she belong in a beginner class? I think not. But that's another story.

The course is at Salem Community College the instructor's name is Sally Prasch. She is amazing. Very nice and helpful. She is just a guest instructor there sometimes.

She decided to start out with the hard stuff first because then the easier stuff is really easy. We received borosilicate tubes, which is hard glass which we were supposed to pull points onto the ends of and make into clear beads. Uh-huh...that didn't happen. My very first attempt I was not turning my hands the same direction so I have a very cool twisty thingie, very cool, not what we were supposed to do. So that was eventually turned into a hanging ornament.

Next, we were supposed to make some little vases and put color on them. I somehow blew the wrong end up. However, with some help, I did manage to get a vase, with color on it. It's got a rather interesting shape to it. All in all from the attempts at hollow beads I have three hanging ornament things...and the vase.

The she showed us how to do some stuff with solid tubing. That seemed a little easier. Since the class was from 8 am to 5 pm, at some point or another I gave up on the hollow beads and such and decided to make a chain out of the solid tubing. When I left last night I had two links completed and the loop started to join the links onto.

So today Sally started by showing us how to make beads with soft glass. The so-called "easy stuff" I heard about yesterday. Yeah, not so much. The problem is that the hard glass you can pretty much not know what you are doing and things turn out ok. Stop working with it, go back to it, no problem. So, there I am, working on my nice soft glass bead, it's looking pretty good and then pop it explodes. Super. You have to keep it hot the whole time. Good to know. So I try again. There is a fine line in the keeping it hot. My next attempt I kept hot, and my lovely color decorations melted right into it. I think I may have gotten it and I may have made three decent beads. I'll see tomorrow when I go back and get them from the oven. But I decided, all in all, soft glass is a pain in the ass.

I went back to the chain. Sally helped me join the two links. It's hard to do because you can only get the one you want to bend hot or else you won't have linked chains, you'll have joined, which is not what I wanted. So then I made two links all on my own, got them linked together with a tiny bit of help and it went really great. So I had two chains of three and I linked them together with another link totally by myself. Then we had a break for dinner. I was going to add three more links but horrible stuff was happening! It was like had no idea what I was doing. I was terribly upset because I had done three really quickly! One of them was all kinds of deformed. I decided it was late and I had had enough of that.

Finally, yesterday and again this morning, Sally showed us how to make "end of the day pendants" using all the scaps you have left over. So I made two of those. It's sort of hard to tell for sure what they'll look like because the color does weird stuff and doesn't show so much until after it's fired. They both looked pretty good though.

So tomorrow it's only from 9-3, which should go fast since I was there 9-8 today and I could not believe it when it was 8! If my pendants look good I think I will stick with that. Give everyone pendants for Christmas! ;->