Lampworking Tips & Techniques Any lampworker who has ever attempted to work with 'striking' glass has experienced the struggle. How do you get all those fabulous color ranges and not just boring tan? Not that tan is a bad color ... but when you spend a small fortune on premium striking glass, tan is not the desired outcome. If we go way back into the glass time machine, the whole striking glass frenzy started with a furnace glass: Reichenbach R-108 Iris Orange - lovingly nicknamed 'Raku' by the lampworking community ... now I'm sounding like a food blogger 😉 There have been countless forum threads, e-books, tutorials, and conversations around how to get Raku to do its magic. Every single one of them has excellent information that anyone who chooses to work with this glass will benefit by reading and watching. I am no expert. I still can't get the full color range I want out of this glass after all this time. However, if we break down the already kno...
Soft Glass Color Inspiration Is there a more quintessential color scheme that represents the mid-century modern vibe as well as teal and ocher yellow? No. There is not. My second choice would be throwing down some orange and ocher green with a coffee brown, but if we are to take the vibe of mid-century modern and match it up against the current 'everything is gray' trend ... then teal and yellow wins. While the glass beads don't contain any actual gray, after I snapped the photo [ against a gray backdrop ] I had a moment ... and realized the overall combination made the most perfect mid mod color palette. swoon . And if I'm being transparent, this palette matches my current home decor so it needed to be made into a color swatch. If you are looking for paint colors that might match this vibe ... consider Benjamin Moore Citrus Burst or Chartreuse for the ocher, and Oceanfront or Caribbean Cool for the teal. Stonington Gray looks good with both. Pretty close match would...
Lampworking Soft Glass Color Reference I've been doing a half-baked job of taking notes when I make beads ... but I am on a mission to catalog all my bead sets and the glass colors I use to create them. There are three driving reasons for this: First , I have a hard time remembering what some colors look like after they've been worked in the flame and I want color charts that I can quickly reference. So I do it for me . Second , I am working on my first e-book of color recipes. Since I cannot lampwork fulltime, e-book sales will help continue funding my glass habits. My hope is to build a library of resources so even when I am unable to make art, I can keep my business going. Finally , I want to share my knowledge and experience. Early in my beadmaking I asked other lampworkers 'do you mind sharing what color that is?' Some were gracious with their knowledge, others were not. And while yes, I do plan to compile much of this information into for profit e-books, I st...