More Chalcedony

Here's another focal made with Chalcedony called Byzantium. This time I made a barrel with the glass and heated and shaped it. Then I blobbed on dots and squiggles and lines of more glass, super heated it by sections and gravity swirled the additional glass into the bead. This gave me a more mottled and striated look. I've found that it's pretty easy to get color out of this glass by super heating in sections an inch away from the cones and then marvering. Sometimes it takes a few cycles for the color to come out but the time spent on this glass is well worth the outcome.

Chalcedony

This is a bead made with the new glass Chalcedony. It's like Raku so I thought it would hate me too... :). Actually, I think it kinda likes me. To make this bead I did side by side spacer/donut beads on a mandrel. Then I did a strip of glass right down the middle of all the spacers in the center. Then I melted them in together using heat and gravity. After that I added strips of glass inbetween the lines and down the center of the wider lines. My goal was to get a really stripy bead. I then shaped it with a graphite marver, added a bit more glass down the area I wanted wider and then super heated the surface. I'm pretty happy with the colors I got. I really do like the reds Chalcedony gives. It's much prettier than that muddy red/brown that you get with Raku. This bead is named Mesopotamia and it's currently up on eBay.