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Old 2010-02-19, 12:12am
sislonski sislonski is offline
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Join Date: Jun 30, 2005
Posts: 6,442
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I use silver glass in two of my tutorials and do cover how to use the certain silver glass colors from DHelix glass but they're more on how to make a particular bead. So if you're just wanting to get your glass to work?
Try this:

Work DH glass, just about any of it (with the exception of a few) hot. Then let it cool. Let it get really cool. When you melt it, it will turn clear. If it isn't almost clear then you didn't get it hot enough. Once you have it really hot, let it cool, cool, cool, cool. Spell mississippi three or four times. buy now it should be dark brown

Then flash it in the tip of your flame, it will turn even darker brown, almost black.

If you plan to encase it with clear then you only want to heat it very quickly in the hottest part of the flame. Keep doing this in short intervals until you see just a hint of blue. Then encase and it will bring the colors out. Play with that a few times and eventually you'll know how many times or how much color to bring out to get particular colors like green, blue or purple.

When melting in the clear encasement don't get the core of the bead, in this case your reactive glass (DH) too hot or you'll lose your color. It's important to melt it slowly.

If you're not encasing it. I usually will make up the bulk of my bead with another color, like black for example then encase the black with the reactive glass, so you're not using up as much DHelix glass. Again melt it hot, really hot, making sure you don't lose your shape. It's consistent also to make sure that your Helix glass is kept evenly heated. Or not, if you don't evenly heat you'll just get different colors.

So you've heated it. Let it cool and cool and cool some more. Then flash it in the tip of your flame. Then turn up your propane, or just insert the bead into the hot part of the flame, rolling your bead, take it out, hold it into the light look for color, then just keep doing it over and over until you get some color or the color that you're looking for without encasing it.

I wrote this out very quickly so I hope it all makes sense rather then just confusing you.

I should note: even if you don't get the glass really really hot when you're first melting it, you'll just get different variations of color, but they'll be more striking the hotter you get it and the more you let it cool (the darker it gets when cooling.)
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Last edited by sislonski; 2010-02-19 at 12:19am.
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