Can you use frit on wine bottle beads?
 

I've been enjoying making beads from various wine bottles and have tumbled etched and used fine silver for some variation. Just wondered if you can use frit for surface decoration as long as it's less then 5% of the bead?

thanks!
Trish

might work...might not. even though wine and beer bottle glass is soda lime, and supposedly in the 90coe range, it's a very viscous glass....stiff as shit really. so even if you had 90coe frit, it might work it might not....

i'm sure someone will chime in with a definitive answer, but my limited knowledge of bottle glass is just that...limited to only a few sessions of torch play.

i got it in my head to make an "Absolute Marble" out of an Abolute bottle and put the label/metal sticker from the top of the bottle on the marble or the marble stand. i wasn't going to use the whole bottle (although that was my first thought) but i only had a midrange and even an 1.25" mib out of bottle glass was very hard to do....so stiff.

maybe someday if i even upgrade to a 3 stage torch i'll try the entire bottle experience. that's like a 3" mib though!

I have used a small amount of frit as surface decoration with no unfortunate effects.

I have not tried encasing it.

Bottles are in the 82ish range, if I remember correctly.

The definitive answer is "try it" :)

The __% approach is a myth really. I can put a splinter of steel in a marble or a bead and have it be 1% of the marble and it can still cause it to crack.

It's better to understand how the glasses are working against each other. Having a small amount of incompatible glass on the surface of an item can occasionally work because the stress from the incompatible contractions in the glass are effectively dissipating outwards into the world as opposed to being buried in the glass and pushing the molecules in weird directions.

Also, keep in mind that sometimes bottles for a single brand of beverage can sometimes come from different vendors that may not be as exacting in their batching. So, for example, the COE can be different between two Bombay Sapphire Gin bottles, even if you buy them off the same shelf.

Wonderful info... Thank you all :-)
I may experiment a little, just to see. Would not have expected 2 bottles of the same brand could be incompatible... Good to know! I have a couple of champagne bottles from a wedding to make into jewelry for the bride and bridesmaids. Will be careful to not mix them together. Actually, one bottle will probably give me plenty of beads.

I did put some fine silver drops on a few wine beads, then I tumble etched them and some of the silver had come off and left small pits. Such a shame. Perhaps I didn't melt them in enough. First time I had ventured into using silver wire. Always so much to learn!

I wouldn't tumble etch beads with silver on them. It's not got the sturdiest of holds and the tumbling is just too much for it.

Thanks Nicole. Glad it wasn't just me then. And really glad it was only 4 beads I messed up and not all of them!