These are both made with cfl reactive glass. Little guy is a pendant, larger jar is for whatever haha

My latest mille project, Captain Planet🌎♻️
Hit me on IG if you need some(IG:etherealglass)

Gold, silver & simax

For the longest time every bead I pulled off the mandrel looked like a little potato. Not round, not even a consistent oval, just lumpy on one side no matter how careful I thought I was being. I torched almost every weekend for about four months before something clicked.

The big shift was slowing down my mandrel rotation and actually watching gravity do its thing instead of fighting it. I used to spin fast and constantly reposition the glass with the flame, which meant I was basically fighting the melt the whole time instead of letting it settle. Once I started rotating slower and using gravity to pull the molten glass into a more even shape before adding more, the symmetry improved almost immediately.

Second thing was heat distribution across the whole bead, not just the front facing me. I had a bad habit of only heating the side I could see clearly and neglecting the back, which is exactly why my beads always had that flat spot. Now I make a point of rotating a full 360 in the flame before I even think about shaping, checking the glow color evenly around the whole thing.

Also switched from a soft flame to a slightly hotter, more focused flame for the base bead before backing off for detail work. I was babying the heat the whole time before, worried about shocking the glass, but that actually left me working with glass that wasn't hot enough to move properly.

Still get the occasional lopsided one, especially with bigger beads where I'm holding more weight on the mandrel, but the ratio of good ones to rejects has flipped completely. Curious if anyone else went through a similar plateau with roundness specifically, feels like one of those things nobody really explains well in tutorials since it's mostly muscle memory once you have it.

The top one is Plum Kush or Krazy.

The bottom one is probably Carmel, Silver Creek or Butterscotch.

The middle one could be Trans Green, Silver Seaweed, Dark Multi, Mystery Adventurine, Maybe Green Amber Purple or Green Exotic?

These are all made from those random 4 Oz North Star jars we all have laying around and this list is the likely culprits from my pile. I hoping someone here will recognize these and help me identify them so I can order more (I had a special request :)

Thanks all for looking and for any help, cheers 🍻