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FEATURE STORY

BY LIZ KUHNS	Bright yellow-and-orange sunflowers climb up a blue background on this miniature glass perfume container and pendant. The floral motif and highly contrasting colors of the design are typical of the glass beads and bottles Heidi Brodersen lampworks.
Heidi Brodersen turns her flameworked floral beads into pendant-sized perfume holders. Liz Kuhns and Heidianneliesa Brodersen walk you through making a “Scented Pendant,” p.78. All photos: Liz and Roger Kuhns

Liz Kuhns and Heidianneliesa Brodersen walk you through making a “Scented Pendant,” p.78. Who would want to live on an out-of-the way island that is but a mere pinprick on the map and surrounded by the icy waters of Lake Michigan, and why? This is exactly the place glass art expert Heidianneliesa Brodersen has chosen as her home and for her studio called Frozenfyre. Surely the move to Washington Island, a mere 20 square miles in size, must have had a negative effect on her business. “Could not be better!” comes the contrary reply. “You know, when I had my shop in Iowa, no one would come to buy. Over a year ago we moved here and the strangest thing happened. The beading ladies would come to my shop I had in the downtown village, and in 30 to 45 minutes everything would go. Sometimes I would have 500 specially made glass beads in stock and in the blink of an eye they would all be sold. I have since moved into my studio next to our guest cottage, and still the demand is there. It’s easy to see why the demand is so great. Every day in Heidi’s studio is an experiment, yet the glass work produced there is of exceptional quality and demonstrates her natural talent towards color and form. Producing glass art should be fun, and watching Heidi, I know that anyone who works with such a smile on her face and sparkle in her eyes is surely having a tremendous amount of fun. Especially with her latest passion, that of drawing on the principles of bead making to create distinctive perfume bottles, a demonstration I am about to witness. Closeup of a round bead from necklace above shows the depth and detail of the glass flowers as well as the artist’s signature, a feature whose importance she emphasizes to other artists. PLAYING WITH FIRE. In a clinically clean environment to avoid dust contamination of the glass, the lady who admits that she loved to play with fire as a young girl starts her latest creation. With no preconceived idea of what the bottle will look like once it’s done, Heidi, as she likes to be called, starts twisting molten teal-green glass around a graphite mandrel. Explaining that quality supplies create quality art, Heidi says she uses only Czech glass made from high standard virgin silica. “You know, the old way of making glass bottles was restricted to the shape of the graphite mandrel. In fact, the thickness of the mandrel was what created the volume size of the bottle. And the glass stoppers would eventually break, too. I was tired of being limited to the 3/4 inch of these rods. You can’t even get a drop of perfume in there. I needed something different. I needed volume.” Amazed at what is happening in front of my eyes, I am watching what seems like a totally shapeless blob of glass being wound around the mandrel in an ever widening circle of strips. “It seems like no one had ever thought of closing off one end of a bead to create a vessel.” Heidi’s explanation continues as more layers are added, first from one end, then from the other. “What I discovered is that if you add layers to create a cylindrical object, you can then build your bead and not blow it and thus get more volume inside. A hollow bead with the one end closed off can then take a stopper made from cork. Now the idea is to fill these perfume bottles with essential oil which will permeate the cork. By wearing this around your neck, the cork will slowly release the wonderful smell and your skin will have no direct contact with the oil, should you be allergic to it.” The vessels Heidi makes are about an inch and a half on average, with the stoppers perhaps another half inch long. Lampworked floral necklace. By now the two sets of layers are touching each other and Heidi is making sure there are no holes anywhere from where the air inside could escape. Held in the flame of the blow torch, the sealed bead slowly expands, as if by magic. Only it isn’t magic at all. What’s happening inside the bead is simply a chemical reaction between solid carbon (the graphite on the mandrel) and the oxygen gas (from the trapped atmosphere inside the bead) to form carbon dioxide gas. It’s natural for such a chemical reaction to increase the volume of a flexible object by 30 percent, and as soon as all the oxygen inside the trapped atmosphere is used up, the bead stops expanding. Sometimes when the concentric rings are uneven in thickness, a blow hole can open up in a weaker spot — but this can be avoided with care. Not that a blow hole means the end of your project — glass worked with a blow torch can be very forgiving when a mishap occurs. All you need to do is reheat and rework the glass. The hollow bead is left to cool slightly before being rolled in a mold used for marble marvering, to even out the roundness. I’m left looking at a perfectly round bottle stuck to the mandrel: quite impressive, but I can’t help notice that all the other bottles on display have beautiful flowers inside. How did they get there, I wonder. Lampworked floral pendant. “Oh, all the tourists normally ask that too,” Heidi laughs with mischief. “That is the next step. I use what are called stringers and murrinis in the glass trade,” she continues. “I think of this as water-color painting with glass, using the long threads of glass as my pigment and the flame as the water. The murrinis are the cluster strands used to illustrate the stamen in flowers.” First, Heidi carefully paints small dots of molten stringers, white and then orange on top of that, into a flower pattern, then pulls the dots into petal shapes. I would have liked red petals to contrast with the green glass but am told that the COE (coefficient of expansion) range of red is so limited, the two cannot be used together, particularly with high-quality glass from the Czech Republic where the green glass has a COE of 104 and the red a COE of 115. For this reason, not much red is seen in glass work. Next, Heidi inserts small bits of murrinis into the center, and suddenly the perfume bottle is decorated with beautiful flowers. Last but not least, Heidi adds her signature. Glass art signature canes are a hallmark system devised by the Glass Art Society. Every year an artist can have his or her signature registered and photographed by the Signature Cane Project in Pennsylvania (e-mail dohan@juno.com or dohan@lentzlaw.com). This is a wonderful copyright protection scheme and has proven very successful over the years. Finally, the entire design is sealed with clear glass and put into a kiln to anneal at 1000°F for about 30 minutes to an hour. Once it has cooled down, the bottle slips off the mandrel with ease. If more volume is required, the bottle can be reheated to 1300°F on the second day and blown out further. A completed perfume container attached to a silver and glass bead necklace. In a matter of a few hours, a wonderful perfume bottle has been created. “This method of creating glass bottles should probably be called the amphora method, as it is basically a closed hollow bead. But what is interesting about this, too, is that this technique allows an artist with limited tools and without a furnace to still be able to create something beautiful,” Heidi points out. STRESSING SAFETY Throughout the entire demonstration, safety has been a big factor. From wearing AUR92 safety glasses to good ventilation, every aspect of safety was important. “There are so many ‘Do It Yourself’ bead-making kits out there that are very dangerous, as the manufacturers sacrifice safety for price. That is why I always say that if someone cannot afford the proper equipment, they should wait [to make glass beads] till they can [afford the safety equipment]. Bead-making teachers should also become certified as there is definitely a right way and a wrong way of making beads. And it is the wrong way that can be so dangerous.” “So what is the next creative step for you?” I ask Heidi. “There is not much left that is new in the bead world anymore, so I am now making beads to match my perfume bottles.” Cradling her new super powerful GTT Mirage blow torch, she enthuses about her new direction and her perfume bottles. Whatever her next development may be, the bead world is watching as it will surely be something wonderfully inspiring.

Liz Kuhns

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Heidianneliesa Brodersen can be contacted by e-mail at heidi@frozenfyre.com or through her Web site, www.frozenfyre.com.

Elizabeth Kuhns is a professional gemologist and jewelery designer now based in Door County, Wisconsin. She consults to the jewelry industry and can be contacted by e-mail at liz@lithogem.com or through her Web site, www.lithogem.com.

 

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