THIRTY-SEVEN MANDRELS...

Did I mention how much I loved my new Glass Hive Annealer???

I got up really early this morning to torch, finishing up what I needed for the Twin Cities Bead Bazaar this weekend... mostly coordinating spacers for my focals (I'm trying something new) & ended up w/ seventy something beads (including probably 10 focals) on 37 mandrels & TONS of room to spare! (& nothing sticking to anything else!! LOL!)



Here's one half of the interior. I put the expanded stainless grate in yesterday...

In order to use anything above the bottom inch or so of the grate, I had to take the exterior shelf off of the front so that the mandrels can come out of the door at steeper angles........... BUT, LOL, what I found out REALLY quickly was that because the kiln is so narrow depthwise (like 6"??), any mandrel placed about 2" or higher in the grate slid right back out. LOL. Okay... now what??? So... expanding on what I was doing last week (I'll explain that w/ the next picture), I now add a quick little blob of glass to the end of the mandrel & it works as a little "hook" to hold on to the grate. LOL. (it works!!) Anyway... it was really fun to see how many beads I could get in here... imagine what I could do w/ more time! (they have to anneal & then I need to clean them tonight still!)

So... this is what I was doing last week before I got that grate, LOL.

I only had one "kiln couch" that is about 6" wide that I could rest the mandrels on in the kiln so that they beads didn't touch the floor. I know, you can lay beads on the floor, but not the ones w/ Rubino on them.......... so, once I filled up the existing "couch", I started thinking about what I could do to keep the beads off of the floor of the kiln & came up w/ ^THAT^. Worked perfectly. I just melted 2 big blobs of glass on either side of the bead, let them get really droopy / drippy & then flattened the bottoms w/ my marver. LOL. Worked like a charm. Kinda funny, huh?? Oh well... I won't need to do that anymore. You can certainly use my idea, though! :o)