Glass- Beadmaking Workshop with Julie Anne Denton (UK)

Fun with form an introduction to Borosilicate

The class is designed to gently introduce the bead maker to quirky off mandrel forms, such as a penguin, a fish, an elephant and a flamingo. These pieces are made in soft glass and will teach the student a variety of techniques including how to ‘gather’, how to work with scissors and scaled up ‘mashers’, how to make use of the ‘glass tripod’ to create a stand for your animal, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ punties are necessary depending on the style of animal and ‘auto-annealing’ whilst you work is a learnable necessity. Towards the end of day one we shall begin to create a larger scale piece of sculpture in components, which takes the form of a flower. This shall be made with borosilicate glass and it will focus on the use of multiples as a way to create a more complex form, we will utilise glass ‘bridges’ to help us construct the form easily and flower will demonstrate just how versatile borosilicate glass can be. On day two we will create a small Venetian mask pendant in borosilicate, finish off our flower in time for annealing and later sandblasting. Whilst the flower is annealing we shall create a number of small borosilicate objects including a heart pendant which will allow us to delve into the extraordinary colour palette which borosilicate has to offer.