How it's done

If you've been following my blog you might have seen photos of glass beads and comments that I make glass beads.

This post is to show you a bit of the behind the scenes stuff. I took some photos while working yesterday, and I'm going to share them with you.

Let's get started, shall we?

This, is my workbench. Yep, where all the glassy magic happens. Its not usually any cleaner than what you see here.

And apparently I've started collecting cute things to go on top of my ventilation hood. I'm okay with this fact. Right now I have a turtle and two pirate duckies with an old fashioned coke bottle behind them. This collection may grow.

This is my kiln. This is really where all of the magic happens. When I'm done with a bead I pop it into the kiln (960 degrees! or 954 in this case, it'll get there.) and the kiln will control the cooling process at roughly 400 degrees an hour so the beads don't stress fracture.

This is my glass. I have a lot of colors, but I also have room for a lot more. I work with 104 coe glass, coe is the Coefficient of Expansion. It's pretty awesome but I won't bore you. :)

All of these things allow me to make works of art like: