Striped ribbon stringers and what the others call ribbon glass cane, is the topic for today.
There’s lots of uses for them but I find these flat ribbon glass cane/stringers are wonderful to use on flower petals and leaves.
Learn how to make them on this video….
“Caneworking is a glass blowing technique that is used to add intricate patterns and stripes to vessels or other blown glass objects,” according to Wikipedia.
I think you can spend a whole career just on perfecting glass cane alone and many Italians families have developed unique designs of glass canes, down through history.
These simple to complicated decorative stringers can be called by a lot of names…
Fancy Latticinos are striped stringers/canes using clear and colored stringers that you twist. You can buy them by the name of filigrana rods, but they are a little expensive and I like making mine unique.
Mary Lockwood has a free tutorial on simple latticino glass cane that you might enjoy.
Karen Hardy demos how to use an optical mold to make latticino glass cane like the pros in Italy. The down side with molds is that you’ve got to invest a lot of money for them. It would be worth the cost if you used a lot of latticino glass cane or sold them.
Twisties are in the stringer family. Most of us probably use these the most.
Examples of twisty glass cane (stringers) above
You can make your beads personal and unique by creating your own favorite color scheme twisties. Artists can spend a lifetime just studying and experimenting with color schemes.
If you would like to learn more about color… my Tutorial 101, 102 & 103, really, really go into depth about color schemes…primary, secondary colors, complementary and split complementary color schemes.
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FreeBee experiment…Here’s something fun that I do quite often to spark my creativity.
If you have purchased my Tutorials 101- 103, go back and reread the complementary color scheme section. Or go Google complementary color schemes.
Now…
1. Pick 1 color scheme from the complementary color schemes and make yourself about 20 different twisties.
2. Then make about 30 different beads using these twisties on different shaped beads and different sizes of beads. Let your imagination lose!
You’ll end up with a wonderful family of beads that mix and mingle to make a couple of bracelets or a killer necklace.
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Glass Cane Ribbon
Back to my flat striped stringers/cane. I call them ribbon stringers. But the top purple and orange rod in the photo is also referred to as ribbon cane, so it can be confusing.
My glass cane ribbons can be simple, like I demoed in my video, to super complex.
Some of the ones I use on my Peony and Iris flowers take me hours to make. Torching, I apply the glass ribbon stringers like flower petals. I tend to use them up really quickly.
In the photo below, I used ribbon stringers on my flower petals, leaves and as ribbon.
The glass ribbon stringers I demoed in the video, I use to show veins in flowers or leaves. It gives a more natural look to the flower or leaf.
I hope you enjoyed the demo and give this flat ribbon glass cane a try!
Do you do flat ribbon glass canes (stringers)? How do you use them?
Patsy :)
My Peonies…Click on flowers for details
If you look really close at my flowers beads, you will see that some petals has 8 or more stripes, and different color schemes on each side of the petals and leaves. Those striped ribbon stringers took hours to make! :)
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