Some more buttons. These were close enough in size that I marketed them as a set for Bead&Button.

Set of three blue and purple floral buttons. Effetre, 2007? Roughly 25mm across.

Like most of the floral buttons I make, these were cased with a transparent over an opaque, using the lollipop approach. I've been experimenting with the sequence, a bit. For my earliest, large buttons, I would flatten the glass into a disk, put a dollop of clear on the disk, heat, mash, put a small glob of colorless clear on the back, punty onto a cobalt colored boro mandrel (this made it easy to tell whether I needed to pick any of the dark blue boro out of the clear colorless effetre) trail on the floral bits, and edge with twistie. Then came for me the longest step, melting in the twistie. The button would often get sort of floppy at this stage, making me very thankful for my torchtop marver.

Then I would punty with effetre to the front of the button, get the spacer bead out of the kiln, heat that up, heat the back glob up and mash together to make the shank. But of course, puntying twice adds time to the process, so then I tried trailing the decorations onto the disk while it was still part of the rod, adding the glass to the back, and putting it directly on the shank bead. Problem with that method was the bead release often broke, and it was hard to flatten the button: when on the puntile, it was just a matter of rolling along the edge of the torchtop marver—there's no good way to do that once the button is on a mandrel. So for the latest buttons, I've gone back to the old method—really, the breakthru for me was using colored boro puntiles, as that made it very easy to tell whether I'd left any behind.

file created 4jun08.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.