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Old 2007-08-14, 7:39pm
RyanTheNumberImp RyanTheNumberImp is offline
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Join Date: Oct 30, 2005
Location: Calgary, Canada
Posts: 541
Default Aquarium Bead Tutorial

This tutorial focuses mainly on using murrini. I find that murrini don't always mix visually with fish made via dots and stringers, since the style is so different.

I have a tutorial on making fish murrini here: http://www.lampworketc.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=63699

I am making a marble in the photos since I have been wanting to try an aquarium marble, but beads are done in a very similar way.

To start, here are some of the materials I have prepared

These are the murrini I am using:


Here I have some blue dicho scraps puntied onto some clear, as well as the fire polished murrini arranged in the kiln


With exception of the one guy at the back (I decided I had too much blue the way it was so I moved him away so as to not accidentally use him), they are all organized in an easy to pick up manner on a graphite plate.

Here is some cane I am using:

These are all hand pulled from scratch, the bottom one was made with hand pulled filligrana because I didn't have any on hand. I find that adding too much green to aquarium beads can take away from them so I avoid using green in the background.

Here are a few notes about murrini and cane. I find murrini that have been flame polished (in either the kiln or by hand in the flame) are slightly easier to use. The optimal murrini slice will be 1-2mm thick. Super thin slices look nice, but as soon as you waft them through the flame they become soft and get smooshed. Very thick slices are harder to push level to the surface of the bead. Murrini are rather shocky for their size so should be preheated. I use two categories of cane, seaweedish cane and cane for the ground. Seaweed cane should look very delicate and generally involves 6-10 bits of filligrana spiraling around a clear core. This cane looks best when it is rather thick. The ground cane I use is normally some silvered ivory and encased striped cane.


To begin the bead, I form a core of cobalt blue and encase it with the dichro


I simply work the dichro like a very heat sensitive rod and encase in the normal fashion, I have never had any problems with burning off the coating.

The dichro is then quickly given a very thin coating of clear to protect it, and carefully melted in.

I also heat and pull off the ends with tweezers to bring the dichro to a point and clean it up.

I then add swipes of silvered ivory stringer to the background.

When making aquarium beads, since you generally have fairly thick layers of encasing, I try not to melt in designs so much that they become flat. If you leave them partially raised during encasing you will be able to see the depth.


And here I have added some of my cane.


This is about as much as I will melt the decoration in


Here I have added some swipes of pink and teal striped cane.

I encase the decoration with large swipes of clear from a 10-15mm rod.

bubbles are't much of an issue with aquarium beads, but I still like to reduce them where possible.


I have added my first murrini, a starfish. Adding murrini can be tricky. I heat the spot where I want to put it while wafting the murrini through the flame with tweezers. I then take both the bead and the murrini out of the flame and press it in as far as it will go.


I find that the bright oranges and reds of starfish peeking through the various canes really brightens up the bead.


I slowly melt in the murrini by heating it then pressing the tops of the murrini in with a brass stump shaper. To do so, rest the tool on top of the murrini long enough for it to harden so that you don't distort it.
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Last edited by RyanTheNumberImp; 2007-08-18 at 8:15pm.
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