Picture 012

Ouch, look at those scorch marks. This marble was made by the "two rods gather" technique in which you smoosh two rods of glass together in the flame, kneading the resulting gather as it grows. If you use two different rods (here I used putty gray and pastel purple) you get a complex grain in the twisted, kneaded gather at the center, and poles of the two distinct colours.

Here I think I was betrayed by my own impatience and by the glass; I got it pretty hot, and something smoked (probably the gray, which has reducing tendencies like the turquoise). It's a shame, because the surface quality is not bad and the roundness is pretty good. The poles are ugly as sin, however (there's a reason why I'm not showing them here!).

I like the complex "marbled paper" look of the mixed colours and will definitely use the 2-rod gather again, even though it is slower than the Drew Fritts "bundle of logs" gather.