Picture 004

Here's number 1, a single horse about an inch long, embedded in the dead centre, or as close as I could get, of a clear marble. I did this by making a large lollipop and applying the dichro fragment to that, then building up the lollipop to encase the fragment and protect it (in the course of which anxious operation I introduced the horrid cone-shaped bubble that makes this horse appear to be wearing a scarf). I then puntied onto one edge of the lollipop, keeping my tools away from the delicate dichro piece; melted off the parent rod, and started building up the weird-shaped glass blob into a sphere. In the course of this, I was so worried about keeping that horse flat and undistorted that I wasn't really paying attention to my encasing, and you see how many bubbles I introduced. I was very sad about the bubbles, but finished the piece anyway just to see how the horse would hold up during all the rounding and smoothing. Once isolated in the core, it held up just fine. one foot, the end of the tail, and the head are slightly skewed out of the original plane, but "not so's you'd notice."