Tutorials |
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Ribbon Cane made super easy! Decide on your colour combination to be used and select the glass rods in the appropriate colours - you need a combination of both pastel and transparent colours. Some suggestions for combinations:
Materials:
Technique: |
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1. Start by making a grape-sized gather in Clear glass. When the gather is large enough, flatten the end of the gather on your graphite paddle. This is now referred to as the ‘face’ of the gather and the rod is the ‘handle’.
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2. While keeping the flattened gather warm in the flame, melt a large gather on the Yellow pastel rod and place it onto the face of the Clear gather.
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3. Heat the Yellow rod to soften the glass and detach the Yellow rod by flame-cutting. Re-heat the Yellow ‘blob’ of glass to get it even and flatten this on your graphite padlle.
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4. While keeping the flattened stacked gather warm in the flame, melt a large gather on the Orange pastel rod and place it onto the flattened Yellow face of the stacked gather.
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5. Heat the Orange rod to soften the glass and detach the rod by flame-cutting. Re-heat the Orange ‘blob’ of glass to get it even and flatten this once again on your graphite padlle.
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6. While always keeping the flattened stacked gather warm in the flame, melt a large gather on a Clear rod and place it onto the Orange face of the stacked gather.
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7. Heat the Clear rod to soften the glass and detach the rod by flame-cutting. Re-heat the Clear ‘blob’ of glass to get it even and flatten this once again on your graphite paddle.
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8. Heat the entire stacked gather and roll into a cylinder shape on your graphite paddle.
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9. Using a Clear glass rod, encase the cylinder all around the centre to cover all the exposed pastel colours. This prevents the pastel colours from ‘bleeding’ or spreading uncontrolled later on, when heating a bead with the applied ribbon cane.
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10. Heat the head of a Pyrex punty and spot-heat one side of the cylinder. Now attach the punty to the heated side, this punty now becomes your new handle.
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11. Heat the original Clear rod to soften the glass and detach the rod by flame-cutting.
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12. Heat the second Pyrex punty and spot-heat the cylinder on the side directly opposite to the attached punty. Now attach the second punty to the heated side, you now have two new handles.
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13. Start heating the ball of glass in the flame, rotating slowly and allowing the heat to really sink in and heating the ball right down to the core. Continue heating until you have a soft smooth ball of glass which moves easily when pulling and pushing on your handles.
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14. The hot, soft ball of glass should now be glowing red evenly throughout, any shadows are cool parts and needs to be heated. Take the hot soft ball of glass out of the flame while rotating the handles to keep it from falling and allowing it to cool slightly.
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15. The hot, soft ball of glass should now be glowing red evenly throughout, any shadows are cool parts and needs to be heated. Take the hot soft ball of glass out of the flame while rotating the handles to keep it from falling and allowing it to cool slightly.
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(made by Johan de Lange from Glass & Fire) |
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