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You might have seen this on one of the frogs I listed today:
Some of you might immediately see how this "dot ladder" is created, others might scratch their head. It's
fairly simple to do, but it does require some preparation: a "clear
core cane" (or murrini). No step-by-step instruction, just the basic
idea: - make a clear barrel on a steel-punty (or whatever you use to make murrini) - encase this in a thin layer of white - encase this in a thick layer or your transparent color of choice (I used rubino oro) -
pull out into a thicker and thinner cane (from 3mm to 6-7mm) (pulling
ONE murrini into a cane of different diameters) gives you more stuff to
work with, and it's faster than making several murrini in the different
diameters). - cut some slices that are not too thick (2-3mm), maybe using my nippers :-) and preheat these on a hotplate (if you have one).
Pick
the murrini up with tweezers (tungsten tweezers would be best, but who
can afford those anymore?!) - ONE AT A TIME, heat the spot in the bead
where you want to place them, and gently push the first murrini onto the
bead. Continue preheating the spot and placing the murrini as close as
possible to the previous one, until all murrini are placed, either in a
line or in a tight pattern.
You
can see in this picture that the "upper" murrini are more rounded than
the lower ones. That's because the lower ones were placed last, and each
time you preheat the bead in order to place the next murrini, the
murrini that is already on the bead will get some of that heat and will
round out. You can minimize this by "tapping" on top of each murrini
with the magic wand, before placing the next. That will cool off the top
of the murrini and keep the shape better than just heating the bead. Also,
in the beginning you should place your murrini on a bead made with very
SOFT glass. It takes a lot longer for example to heat up black glass
then to heat white glass, so white glass will be a little easier.
Once
you have place all the murrini in your pattern, heat one murrini at a
time, and push it down with the Magic Wand. Work slowly, with very
little heat, kind of in a "rythm": heat, push down, heat push down....
working from one murrini to the next, like stepping stones.
You
can either just "unify" the pattern and leave it slightly raised, or
you can flatten it all the way - in which case I roll the whole pattern
on a graphite marver. Once the individual murrini are all connected, I
basically treat them like one big piece.
You
might wonder why these murrini look different from the ones I used in
the frog bead shown above. I actually used the same murrini-cane - but I
only had an endpiece left for this mini-tut - and in the endpiece the
white layer was thicker than in the middle, where I cut the pieces for
the frog from. The thicker the white layer, the more "mushy" the whole
thing will look. How to get a THIN layer when making a murrini? that's a
topic for another mini-tut...if anybody is interested.
You can
use the same technique using commercial murrini - remember the bag of
square green murrini I bought on my trip to Murano this November?
I
used them in the same way on some other frog beads. Using square
murrini is a lot of fun, since you can really "puzzle" them together.
How to MAKE square murrini? now THAT is another very long story....
if
you want this mini-tut as a FREE PDF, click on the "add to cart" button
below. There is no charge, it was just the only button I could find...
(the
link to the PDF doesnt work at the moment, since I have reached my
"free download limit" at e-junkie, I am working on it...)
