Pictures from Stumpsucking

Above and below are pictures of the same little octopus - above you can see it is encased in clear glass and made into a paperweight, below is what it looked like beforehand. So exciting. The picture above was taken spur-of-the-moment... so it leaves some to the imagination... you'll just have to believe me for now that it turned out pretty great and totally 3D inside the paperweight.

And now for some action shots! I was having fun with my camera while Brandyn sweated and did all the hard work :) Until my camera battery ran out...

Here I am setting up for the sucking... we preheated the little things in the pipe-warmer on a metal plate... nothing fancy but it seemed to work great. Also preheated the stumpsucker with a hand torch that you can see resting on the table.Brandyn seemed to need about a 2 dip gather to pick up the little things in this 1 1/2" stumpsucker. It was actually quite easy (although to be fair he did all the work!)can you see the octopus inside this glass in the picture below? This is after another dip was taken over the encasement...After some shaping with a neat steel marble mold we turned them into paperweights and put them in the annealer. It was pretty cool... I look forward to doing it again. More pictures to come of the finished paperweights... I am going out of town (visiting Tim's family in PA) and I won't get to play more with this until I get back (including taking pictures of the finished paperweights).