First Marble Help

[toy4x4]

Yes, I know I have a lot of time to practice, but want to ask a few questions first.

I was trying to do the first lesson in Torchworked Marbles Vol 1 and ran into a few issues. :( Feel free to tell me these are just experience issues or let me know some tips.

1. Gathering - I used 3 1" pieces of white to start with and would have done more, but got tired of trying to figure out how to stick them together. I kept trying to fuse the pieces together and my initial piece attached to the punty kept bending all over the place. Do you fuse the ends furthest away from the punty to avoid this happening?

2. My stainless steel punty kept going in further into the marble and was quite a mess when I was ready to remove it after attaching my glass punty. I assume this is because I kept my mable to hot toward the punty? I was making a marble about 5/8" so it's hard not to have it all the way in the flame.

3. Hot Plate - I assume this is for convience of heating the glass prior to sticking it in the flame so as not to have to slowly introduce it into the flame?

4. Am I just kidding myself with trying to use a hothead at all? I have black sute in the marble. Don't mind trying to learn and accept the ugly marble as I won't even bother buying a kiln until I know I'm going to stick with this.

Thanks in advance! Sorry if this info is somewhere, I tried to find some info..

I'm using 3/32" stainless steel punty, hothead with MAPP gas and a infinate rim mold.

[Cosmo]

A couple things...

1. The best way I've found to gather glass is to just take the punty, stick it to the end of a full size rod, and heat it about 1/2" from the end with the punty. As it gets soft, compress the rod, and it will ball up. You may not have the consitency that you get the way Drew does it, but I don't worry about everything being the exact same size. If you do use the small pieces, I just hold them together with tweezers and focus my flame on the end away from the punty until they start to melt together.

2. Work a little cooler. That will keep your punty from getting as hot and going in as far.

3. You don't need the hot plate. Just hold the pieces with some tweezers and preheat them the way you do full sized rods.

4. Try some transparent glass. It's stiffer, and resists the soot.

[toy4x4]

Thanks for the tips. I went out and tried it again with some of the tips and had better results. Also, i tend not to let gravity do it's work so i tried that to keep the the glass from balling further up the punty.