Thursday, January 29, 2015

I tried out one of the new Double Helix silver glasses called Iaso the other day. Apparently you can get a lovely metallic copper effect all over from it, I tried a couple of things but this bead probably had the coolest effect. Jed from Double Helix has kindly done a video to help people with how to work this new glass as it seems to be quite different to the other Double Helix reduction glasses. What I did was I started off doing exactly what Jed did in his video, with a tiny reduction flame (lengthen the candles from neutral by about 2-3mm) passing the bead actually through the end of the candles right down close to the end of the torch & letting it cool after each pass. But everytime I passed the bead through the flame again after the first time, part of the reduction got erased. So I ended up with stripes of reduction, in different colours, some parts overlapping. There were also some parts that didn't seem to have any reduction at all. So then I turned my reduction flame up a little bit so the candles are about 2 inches long & twirled the bead in the flame about half way up (approx 5-6 inches from the end of the torch) & then took it out to let it cool. I did this about 5-10 times & I could see the red/copper colours coming out but it had a metallic marbled effect. So this is what the finished bead looked like, the second photo shows the metallic effect better than the first one, now i just need to see if it is repeatable.