Really Stupid Newbie Tricks....
 

....I was trying to show someone the other night how to make a simple spacer and for the life of me couldn't think how I hold my hands or anything without sitting at the torch - I guess over the years I have come to take so much of what I have learned (from all of you - and practice) that it has become second nature.

Then I think about some of the really stupid things that I did in the beginning. Here's a couple....share yours if you dare.

1. One of the first things I want to do was to make a vessel but I didn't have any large rods so I happily dipped a pyrex rod left over from a stained glass kaleidoscope kit into bead release and proceded to make a vessel on the end of this pyrex rod - well it made it into the kiln or fiber blanket - I forget which now - and then I heard this loud shatter - the darn thing blew into smithers. Lesson about COE.

2. I took a bunch of tiny watch parts and encased them into a bead - geeze, nobody told me that some of that stuff was super soft copper and they melted into something unidentifiable. Lesson about temp control.

3. You cannot use Dollar Tree mica eye shadow for pixie dust - there's just too much talc or something else in there. Lesson about what mixes with glass.

Now that I think of it, these aren't all newbie blunders. I still try things if they sound like a good idea at the time.

What have you done interesting?

Oh come on people - 13 views and not a one of you has done anything remotely stupid? Don't be shy.

I applaud you for taking risks and experimenting. I didn't do anything remotely close to going outside of the box when I first started. I lived in the garage following step by step instructions in both of my Cindy Jenkins' books. I enjoyed your post though, and I look forward to reading what other people have tried that didn't quite work out.

Love the watch parts idea, it's too bad that didn't work.

Okay Linda here goes...
How about using boro punties to pull complex cane then dipping the punty into water to clean it! It broke go figure.
Touching stringers to see if they are cool enough.
Not cleaning graphite marver before using it...nice grey bead.

let's see...

Don't pull your hot rod from the flame & put a rubber band on the end to store it with others of it's kind...it stinks BADLY & leaves a black scum on the glass that will NEVER come off!:hide:

Don't rest a bead on mandrel in the door of the kiln while you pull that stringer you NEED to finish the bead but FORGOT to do before you started even though you KNEW you would need it. If you do, don't pick it up bare handed!*^#$^&##! THAT HURT! (Can't fingerprint me now, no siree.):fireblob:

Don't get most of the way through your nice floral bead & THEN decide you're in more of an organic frame of mind. You will waste lots of glass & have a bead so HUGE your mother could move in!:jawdrop:

For those of you who have a kiln, don't forget that you need to not just flip your kiln's on switch before you start making that stupendous bead you slaved over for an hour and a half...you also have to set your kiln's PROGRAM to START!](*,)](*,)](*,)

OMG! I've done this. Then you have to sit there keeping that wonderful bead warm in the torch for 20 minutes while the kiln ramps up! :)

aluminum foil. not a good idea :)

Not lampworking, But working on a flat lap the other day grinding on some agate.
It was cold.. cold water on the lap too... I was grinding away...
About 20min later there was a bit of blood on the grinder... I thought hum... must have cut a finger...
Kept on grinding... little bit longer and there was lots of blood... Now I'm thinking what the heck is going on....
My hands were so cold I ground through 5 fingernails and skin...
As you could imagine... when my hands warmed up they were in a little bit o pain.....
Now I felt really stupid... Glad I can type again....
Joe

Ouch, I'm cringing just reading about it. %@$%@$&^@&%&@55634

Joe... OUCH geese I'm cringing too

OK Linda here's mine, not lampwork either...

http://www.lampworketc.com/forums/sh...18&postcount=1

Depends on your kiln. I keep my set value at 968, so my kiln goes to annealing temp as soon as I flip the "on" switch -- assuming I remember to flip the "on" switch . . . #-o

Oh, that grinder story is not good. Hope you've healing up nicely.

I AM a newbie. And I've learned that if you pull a stringer it doesn't cool off right after you set it on the table.

do not wear a hoodie with front pockets. lost a marble once that i just finished polishing, it hit the floor bounced back up and into my pocket. geees, every try to chase down a hot marble on a floor much less one thats sitting in a hoodie pocket. probably the odds where one in a thousand, but so much for my favorite hoodie. Dhope!

See! I didn't know that since I've only ever used on my kiln. But then, I took forever to figure out the VCR too. Thankfully, they didn't change that much when they went to DVD's!:lol:

hehe...handpulled stringers are sharp...the lesson in that is tell hubby NOT to touch my stringers!!! lol...he didnt like the thin goldstone sliver in his finger much!

I've got one.
Don't keep your tools in the flame too long! You wind up with burnt metal INSIDE your bead! Been thru a few dental picks that way.

When I was just starting out I made a beautiful set of beads in a light teal color. Except when I took them outside my studio somehow some of them had changed color. I didn't know what was wrong so I grabbed a couple more rods of glass and made some more beads to match........when I saw them outside they had changed color again. That is when I learned that glass can look totally different in natural light compared to fluorescent light. I also found out that light blues and pale greens and glass of that color can look identical under fluorescent light at first glance....with didy's on. So I installed directional lighting with halogen lights over my work space. I wont tell you how long it took me to figure out I had pale aqua and light teal mixed together.

Otter

One of my first times at the torch:

Hot rod in the right hand slips out of my butterfingers, and onto my sweater (100% cotton, thankfully!) A gasp and a knee-jerk reaction causes my left hand to fly upwards, complete with mandrel wound with hot glass. It all happened so quickly, I didn't really know what had happened until I heard a sizzle, and smelled that awful stench of burning hair. Needless to say, that bead ended up in the water jar, with some interesting "stringer" effects on it. Even though I had a slightly noticeable shorter patch of hair on the left side, I'm just grateful I had hair at all to protect my scalp. This story wouldn't be a chuckler otherwise.

Hot glass has a way of finding the most out-of-the-way, inconvenient place to rest -- even down the neck of my crew-neck tee shirt, then between, well, never mind.

And though it looks cool to put seashells in glass, save them for the clear, blown thingies Tink makes. Molten glass turns them to seashell shaped ash.

When I first started I had a hard time not breaking away the bead release. Once I lifted the mandrel up to look at the bead, knowing full well that the darn thing had come loose from the bead release. It slipped down the mandrel onto my finger and stuck there. I, of course, was trying to save the bead and not my stupid finger. That one left a permanent scar as a rememberance.

Not so much a mistake as an "oh crap" moment. The cold seal on a marble I was making was just a touch too weak and the marble fell on the floor, rolled under the oxygen concentrator and came to rest against the piece of pine wood supporting my bench. There was a very brief flash of flame but thankfully it mostly just smoldered until I stabbed with with some white hot boro to pick it back up. Certainly tough keeping your calm in that situation!

Don't torch in shorts and sandels!.. no matter how warm it is outside..Hot beads can also find their way into croc's! Don't ask me how I know!

Shorts and bare feet is my favorite attire for torching...I have plenty of burn scars on the inside of my thighs from exploding glass. Nothing has ever hit my feet though.

Jan, I too have pulled the oh lets save this bead even though the bead release is broken. Somehow no matter how hard you try to keep it balanced it always ends up in a burn.

Terryl

I am going to tell on my Mother here....She was getting ready to pull stringer from a large diameter rod of glass that was too short to hold in the flame by hand. She put the rod in a pair of hemostats to hold it, knowing that it was too large and had contact with the hemos at only one point. You guessed it, the hot rod goes *sproing* out of the hemos, flips twice, and lands on her inner arm. She will have the scar for awhile.

This earned her a nickname at our house - Singe.#-o

Now, I will tell you how I got MY nickname....

I was working at my HotHead trying to make my first round beads; I think that it was in the second week of my first Lampworking class. I was using a rod of Moretti white, and had a marver in my left hand while I wound the bead onto the mandrel. All of a sudden, the glass turned crystal clear and started to drip into my torch head. Did I think to move the glass out of the flame? Noooo! I drop the marver onto the plastic fold-up table COMPLETELY ignoring the ceramic tile that was in my work area, to get another hand on the mandrel and get that glass under control. There is now a triangular hole clear through the table. My dog likes to go under there and play peek-a-boo with me.....

I am heretofore known as Meltdown.

](*,)

uh, after you roll your molten glass in your frit you should wait just a wee bit before you pour your frit back into a baggie.


Alison

Fool's gold is Iron pyrite and I knew that.....however, it's a world cheaper than gold....and it's pretty.

Eventually, I had to say to myself...."Laurie...it's iron PYRITE".....doesn't encase, it flash burns....but it's cool to hold it in the tweezers and play sparklers...

And then again...I threw away an entire day's work because I thought the glass was damaged, all these dark lines around the nice decoration....had to be weak there, right? and it was merely the reaction of 276 ivory and that deep opaque red.....sigh....

I tried to encase an actual flower in a bead. I'd have to say that was pretty dumb. I don't know what I was thinking!!

Another experiment we tried was to use size 11 seed beads as frit. That didn't really work too well, either.

:roll: