Hair Club For Glass People (and using up old glass)

I love making quirky people in glass. They could be fairies, mermaids, vikings or even pirates. Kind of the good, the bad and the ugly. But each one needs to have plenty of details to keep them interesting. One of the ways to make them stand out is their hair.

Making hair is great way to use up old stringers, ends of glass and add dimension and color at the same time. Use ones that are in the color families or complement what you’re doing.

Make a base gather of glass. Depending on what you’re going to add, this can be an important or less important color. If you’re going to be adding lots of opaques to the outside of it, then it is less important, because it will show less. If you’re going to be adding stringers or shorts that have a lot of transparents in them, then make sure it’s a color you want to stand out.

Make your gather into the traditional short stubby barrel shape for making latticino, and you’re ready to add your stripes. Here’s where you can use up some of the old glass. If you have stringers in the right color families, then start adding. Personally, I like to add lights, mediums and darks throughout, (kind of like giving the bead highlights and lowlights from the hair salon). Once you’ve added all your spare glass and made it nice and big, then I case it in either clear, or a transparent glass like light amber. Don’t forget when you pull the latticino, the color could lose a little intensity because of transparents you have used.

And on the flip side of that, using a deep, rich color of transparent to case it, could unify some iffy colors that are used underneath. Think of it like a watercolor painting. If you put a transparent red over an ivory, a bright yellow, (that you really wanted to use up), and a brown, it would mellow all of it out and they’d have a bit more similarity to them. Experiment and have fun with them.

Get creative and case it in two very different glasses. But do it horizontally, instead of vertically. So you are casing it perpendicular to your stripes so they are side by side. If you do that, it will be like making two different colors of hair latticino, which can cut down your prep time for your beads and give you more variety in a shorter amount of time. Just make sure your original glass is large enough to support two colors for what you’re going to do. It would be horrible to not have enough for your mermaid, where she’d need to wear a bob, instead of the long flowing locks you prefer.

Marcy Lamberson lives in Atlanta, teaches and sells her beads on Etsy, http://www.StudioMarcy.etsy.com, and blogs daily for glass beadmakers and lovers, http://www.StudioMarcy.blogspot.com