View Single Post
  #9  
Old 2007-04-27, 5:47pm
Emily's Avatar
Emily Emily is offline
Missing presumed fed
 
Join Date: Nov 15, 2005
Location: Wherever
Posts: 3,158
Default

Olympic Color Rods sells a photosensitive glass, and there's that one person who sells on eBay who uses it. I can't for the life of me remember her username (except that there's something about it that reminds me of farm or barn or oak, and maybe black or red -- well, that's all totally useless). Her auction text goes on and on about how expensive the glass is, but the glass itself really isn't frighteningly expensive (not to those of us with a heavy Double Helix habit, anyway) -- but the process that you have to go through to make the image register sounds like hell on earth to me. I think if you go to Olympic Color Rods's site and poke around, a description of it might be on there. There was something about using a phonograph turntable to make sure that the bead got exposed to the light evenly for the right amount of time -- or maybe that was on the eBay seller's website. Killed any desire I had to do it, anyway.

Going back to the stuff that Debbie mentioned. I have no experience with that product, but I've tried to use different types of transfers for different things (not photos on beads), and you usually need to find an OLD photocopier that still uses TONER. Inkjet printers absolutely do not work. Recent copiers and laser printers usually don't work. I took a workshop with Susan Lenart Kazmer (it was on etching metal) and she said she'd found a drugstore some place that had a copy machine that you could feed coins into, and that's where she made copies for transfers. (Of course, if you're using special "paper," you need to find a machine like that somewhere that you can put your own paper in, which makes it even harder.) The other thing about toner-based copies is that they need to be fresh (that is, copied fairly recently) to work as transfers.

If you think you might be interested in the product that Debbie mentioned, you might want to go to a forum that's heavily into fusing (is warmglass.com still the place to go?) and ask about it. I'd ask if it requires toner based copies, and if so, then ask for suggestions about how to go about finding a place to get toner copies in these modern times.
__________________
To those who question the real value of the Web: Sea slugs. Now, please fall into a respectful silence, and don't speak again until you understand why you were wrong.
Scorpion and one Intensity 10 lpm 20 psi concentrator
Reply With Quote