Shardly Worth It?

I have seen from time to time people using glass shards as decoration on their beads - the silver glasses have a spectacular effect when used in this way - and I have been thinking about trying to make my own. Surely it can’t be that hard.....

.....and it wasn’t!

However, it was quite fiddly and time consuming (perhaps I’m not doing it right) for just a few shards. I guess there are several ways of making them but I’m going to tell you what I did..... now there’s a surprise!

I figured that the glass needs to be as fine as you can get it so I got some hollow mandrels which have little blow holes in them. I made a bead over the area with the holes; ensuring that glass didn’t actually cover the holes so I made two discs and then joined them together like a conventional hollow bead. I then heated it up evenly and then blew gently down the mandrels. I found very quickly that if you blow too hard then it has a hubba-bubba bubblegum type effect as the bubble pops and you have to start from scratch. Once I’d got my “bubble” and consequently some quite fine glass I tried two methods to get the shards.

No.1. I plunged it into cold water and allowed it to shatter on its own. This gave me a result halfway between every grade of frit and some fine shards. Sadly it also contained quite a lot of granules of bead release. I have spent two days now dissolving and sifting out this bead release but now have some interesting fritty shards to use.

No.2. I removed the coolish bead from the mandrel and cleaned out the bead release, placed it between some clean tissue paper and crushed it gently (or not quite so for some of my less refined efforts). I didn’t want the shards too small so I broke it down slowly and bit by bit. These shards were thus clear of bead release and as they are naturally convex in shape they placed quite easily over beads. I didn’t bother putting the initial blown bead in vermiculite or fibre blanket because the glass is fine and therefore less likely to shatter and even if it did you are about to take a hammer to it anyway!

I then just made some round beads and placed shards over the beads in a random fashion - some large, some small - to create ragged and irregular bits of decoration on my nice bright blue beads. It was pretty easy once I figured it out and eventually made enough shards from 4 blown beads to provide probably 50% coverage of 10 round beads (approx 14mm). So it is fairly time consuming to do but you could make the shards out of any of the glasses that you have. I used aurae simply because I have magpie tendencies (ooooooohhhh shiiiiiiinnnney) but I guess you could experiment with frits and all sorts to make multi layers of shard decoration. If you can’t be bothered to make the shards, or you haven’t really found a need to invest in some hollow mandrels then there are suppliers who sell ready made shards - but where’s the fun in that!?!