christmas balls??
 

it is the season and i want to try to make my own christmas balls. i have a blowpipe, but my question is: do you use beadrelease on the blowpipe or not. if not how do you remove the ball without breaking it????
is there a tutorial??
thanks for all the advise.
greetings Anja

i do it with points.....if you use a blow pipe, no bead release..

points???

i wasn´t complete in my question: i use softglas 104

Just curious here, but how large are you wanting to make them? I just made my 1st hollow bead yesterday, so I'm all jazzed at the idea.

For Christmas ornament I like to use the glaskolben pieces. The neat thing is that they are made with a pipe shaped extension that lets you score and break the ornament free. You can put frit or pixie dust etc. into the glob through the pipe end and you just keep turning it in the flame till the frit melts and then start blowing it.

Andrea

"Points" are used in ornament making. You take a piece of tubing, heat it in the middle, then pull it apart. You get a long, thin, "point" that you use as the blow pipe. Along with some other good videos, TimiaGlass has some on pulling points and making ornaments on his YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TimiaGlass

The following is a good thread on ornaments. Candice (PatientHand on the forums) and others discuss ornament making. There are other threads, too:

http://www.lampworketc.com/forums/sh...light=ornament

Candice sells an ornament tutorial on her Etsy I plan on buying at some point:

http://www.etsy.com/listing/11046601...ament-tutorial

I bought some Neon tubing and tried last night to pull some points with it and failed. Like anything else in this art, it's all about heat control and I just don't have it, yet. For this year, I may buy some pre-pulled points to get me through this year since I'm not quite where I can do it myself.

As far as blowing them on the end of a pipe / hollow mandrel / etc, I'm going to try that next and see how (un)successful I am at it. I haven't seen it done, so I'm not sure how you get it off of the pipe. I would guess you cut / snap it off then flame polish it. No bead release involved. I'm going to do a lot of research on it tonight just by searching these forums.

-BEP

Bepnewt, can't wait to hear from you how it went on a blowpipe.

I don't know if we have points here, I live in Holland and have no idea where to buy those. If someone has a suggestion, please let me know.
thanks for the other threats.
Anja

I know they come from Germany. I did buy some from someone here on LE. Check back in a bit and see if I can come up with the name of the company
Liz R

Bless,

Tubing:
Candice ( PatientHand ) heard I was going to Asheville, NC for vacation and hooked me up with a dear friend of hers that makes Neon signs. The Neon tubing she uses is 90COE, or very close to it. I was able to buy some of the raw tubing from her. A friend of mine sent me some Bullseye scraps she had from fusing/slumping that I will try to melt into stringers to use on the ornaments made from this tubing.

Buying pre-made points:
I had no idea someone sold these until I saw some videos on YouTube. At least I think that is where I saw them. I believe I was searching on "pulling points glass tubing" or something like that and found some videos of people doing it then mentioning that they sell them pre-pulled. I haven't followed up with it, yet.

Blowpipe:
I don't have a hollow mandrel or any kind of blowpipe, yet. I was going to head to a auto brake store at lunch today to buy some stainless steel brake line. I read somewhere this will work for a hollow mandrel for blowing soft glass.

I'm not doing very well right now with my glass melting. I'm a complete newbie, but I'm determined to succeed in some fashion. After I get some sort of result with the blowing on the pipe, I'll let you know how it went. After I find who is selling points, I'll let you know. I'm pretty busy over the next couple days so I'm not sure when I'll get to it.

-BEP

Howaco Glass sells the points. It's a sub heading under the miscell. (sp?) heading
Liz R

PS They work really well

If you have a hollow 1/4" SS mandrel and can make small blown vessels in soft glass, you can make ball ornaments easily. It's much the same process, less the rim and handles, you just need a larger gather of glass.

I've a 6mm hollow pipe that i have used for blowing shards. but i have no idea how to get the ornament from the mandrel in 1 piece.... with shards that is no problem, but with a ornament it is.
greetings anja

well there are different ways I suppose you could do it.

you could anneal it on the mandrel and then use a diamond file to score it and then break it off

or if you don't want to anneal it on the mandrel you can put a groove in the glass (like jack lines) with scissors or tweezers or something and then while tilting the glass up and the end of the mandrel down use your tweezers to put water on the line/groove all the way around. Then gentle tap the mandrel with tweezers or something and it should fall right off. Be sure to have a fiber blanket or something to cushion it so it won't shatter. then using a warm smaller mandrel or warm tweezers pick it up and put it in the kiln.

Just go ahead and use some bead release, since it is a ball it will have a cap (goodwill/thrift stores) and stick the whole thing in the kiln.

^that's what I used to do. Since the tops cover where it was on the stainless blowpipe, it doesn't matter that you use bead release or if the tops look bad. I use tops similar to these http://www.blumchen.com/craft_shop_m..._caps_pg2.html

Bless if you can buy glass tubing you can pull your own points in 104 also.

Here's a video with premade Glaskolben that a few places sell if you're not up to pulling points.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd-dtdcVoOI

Delphi has pre-made Glaskolben as well. Sell kits as well as just the pre-mades.

dj

What a coincidence - that's the video I watched when I learned that you could buy pre-pulled points. Watching it again. I never get enough of watching videos of glasswork.

-BEP

Soft glass ornaments
 

Hey Anja,
I saw your post and have blown soft glass on the torch making some complex pieces. I did a couple ornaments today at work to give you an idea of what is possible. I only had some alabaster kicking around the shop here at Kodak so this is what I got. I will explain how I did it:

-The metal mandrel is stainless...5/16" in dia. and I dipped it in bead release and blew out the release inside the tube while it was still wet...dried it in the flame and added a stringer size bead on the edge and paddled it flat or mavered it.
-Then I coiled a small bubble of glass off the edge of the the marvered glass and let that cool for a second to harden up too add more glass to it. I added another half stick of glass to get a 3/4" marble sized gather.
- I then heated the gather up keeping the heat or flame off the glass on the mandrel. Once it was as round as I liked, I removed it from the flame and waited a few seconds to let the heat equalize in the glass and started to slowly blow until I saw the bubble start to expand and then controled the amount of air/pressure to get a evenly blown ball.
-I then put it in vermiculite for maybe 5-10 mins pulled it out and took it off the mandrel with no problems.
- In one pic I tried it on a 3/8 boro tube with bead release...cracked! I usually gather right on the end of a boro tube and remove the piece and it goes in an annealer.
- I made a pair of mini-jacks from a pair of tweezers. I heated the ends twisted them 90 degrees and ground them so they work nicely if you want to work direcly off the metal blow pipe and crack them off.

Hope this helps, and if you have any more questions I'll try to answer them.

PS: for some reason the site is not letting me upload the pics I took, so I will add them to my profile pics and you can see them there.

Looking good! Thanks for posting this info...it's SO FUN making these, isn't it? ;) And you managed to really handle the Alabaster (aka "Alabastard"! :lol:) glass so nicely! :)

Here are the pics!

*BOOM* You did it! They're great! :)

Thank you, BPierce. Great explanation and pics.

-BEP

Interesting How about a pic?

I love those glass Christmas balls! :) They make me want to try making some!

Thanks BPierce, I know what I'll be doing today ! :)

thanks BPierce,
wauw... they look great. but is it with soft glass or with boro?? that is not really clear to my.
greetings Anja

they are soft glass, he says that is the post he made.

So, I tried this last night. I won't say it was an utter failure because in the end I learned something that has been messing with me in all facets of lampworking.

Right off the bat, I don't think I got my bead release dry enough because it shifted on me early. I was limited in time, so I decided to just do it w/o bead release and concentrate more on the air bubble and forget about ending up with a usable final product.

It was ugly. The gather I did looked like a 3-yr old did it. I was actually laughing as I did it, it was so bad. I was using a large rod ( 12mm ) of clear for it and I should have been using a smaller rod so I could control it better. I forged forward, however!

I got it melted into a semi spherical blob of molten glass and then tried blowing it out. I tried to put the smallest puff of air in there then stoppered the hollow mandrel with my thumb to see if it worked like blowing furnace glass on a pipe - where the heat of the glass will expand the air bubble, etc.

I couldn't get just a small bubble of air in the bottom of the gather. So, I superheated the blob, bubbling the glass of course, and I finally got an air bubble to go in. As you would expect, the glass wasn't evenly heated so it wasn't very centered. I held the air in with my thumb, hoping that the bubble would equalize since the thicker side should have been softer, but it didn't.

I messed with it more, heating, adding air, heating, etc. It was interesting, but I definitely didn't go well. So, I decided to make some basic beads. Making beads isn't that interesting to me, but I find that I can do it well enough that it gets rid of my "I suck" thoughts. And, since I am new, any time I melt glass, I learn more about it.

So, what I did learn between the pipe and the basic beads: I've not been using this torch to it's potential. On a whim, I decided to open it up more - more Propane and more O2, and I was able to do some things better than before. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow night when I mess with ornaments again.

Before I shut down, I added bead release to the 4 hollow mandrels to get them ready for Friday's ornament attempts. I'll be going into it having a better understanding of getting the gather on the end of the pipe and also a "new flame" to work with that will help in the even heating that is needed for blowing a ball on a pipe.

Can't wait.

If anyone makes some of these ornaments, please show us some pics.

-BEP

BEP:

I make these and I can do 'em on a Hot Head in 104, so keep at it and you'll get it!

One tip on the blowing part:

Once you've heated your "blob", if you tilt it upward and gently blow and spin the pipe at the same time, the resulting ornament/vessel tends to stay more round; likewise, if you point the pipe downward while blowing and spinning, the result tends to elongate... ;)

Brian, sounds like you had fun too... One thing I left out is that I use a blow hose when blowing the bubble attached to the blowpipe with a 90 degree swivil. I'm a scientific glassblower so this is what I'm used too. I can do it the other way, but I think using a blow hose prevents things going wrong when bringing the blowpipe to the mouth. I sometimes blow bubbles and pull points off these to make different things and then I don't use the blow hose. Hope your succesful on ornament night!:smile: