[Moth]

Ya know...a 1.5" gather of glass is bigger than it sounds. LOL

I had a heck of a time with this. I tried my first last night.

I didn't make an elaborate little set up for inside because I didn't want to waste time on something I was going to trash. (Yeah I set out with a good mindset LOL).

Anyway, I just put a little bit of frit in the bottom of the stump sucker. Then I pulled some little tiny flower petals...7 of them and attached them to a small gather of lapis blue. Nestled that down onto the frit.

I was in the middle of making offhand pendants when the mood struck me to do this so I didn't have my pieces of large clear ready so I set to work stripping a rod of 12mm clear that I had sitting on the hotplate.

Got it all stripped and started gathering it up. Well, I might as well have not stripped it because after 15 minutes of gathering it still looked pathetically small when held up next to the opening of the stump sucker. I decided to turn my torch up a bit and with a minor on a concentrator that just means turning up the propane. So, I got a generous layer of soot in the gather but I kept on going.

At this point it was just an exercise in what do I have to do next to preheat the 'set up' and get the gather sucked onto it. I didn't have my butane torch ready or anything. I grabbed a propane only hand torch on a little 1 pound canister of propane, clicked it on and waved it gently over the set up about 4 inches above it. That worked pretty good actually. Just the very tip of the flower petals got a glow to them and the color change in the yellow glass I used told me it was hot.

All that time I was keeping my sooty encasement gather hot in the flame. This really was quite a juggling act. I wish I had some help if only just to turn off the hand torch for me. I lost a little heat in my encasement gather fooling around trying to turn off the hand torch.

Anyway, I get the soupy filthy gather of clear down into the top of the stump sucker and I push it down gently just until it is touching the set up then started sucking. It did a swell job!

Pulled the whole thing up out of the stump sucker and basically just melted the bottom smooth. Puntied up to the bottom, melted off the encasement rod and rounded it up only slightly so I could see what was inside.

It did what it was supposed to do, but it isn't pretty. I didn't even crack the punty off the back I just shoved the whole thing into the kiln. LOL

It is nasty, but it worked.

If I get some taken, I'll show horrible pictures later. I definitely know what to do next time to make it all go more smoothly.

Thanks for all the help.
~~Mary