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I love flowers and try to capture one in glass every so often.

These are made in 2 stages. The central bead is made after a number of petals have been prepared and kept warm in the kiln.Then each petal is attached to the central bead and a little bit of sculpting added to make it more lifelike, all the while keeping the other bits of the flower warm to prevent cracking. Once all the petals were added, in this case only 4, the yellow dots were placed in the centre. All the time the mandrel is being rotated to keep the rest of the flower warm, but not melting and so losing some of the pre-introduced shapes. I finally decided to add some green sepals which you can barely see from this angle. You then pray to the glass fairies as you replace the bead in the kiln to anneal, hoping that it is not now too big to fit through the bead door of the kiln. The anneal schedule keeps the beads at 520 degrees centigrade after the last bead has gone in and then changes to a slow controlled cool down so that the internal stresses in the glass which might cause it to break are dissipated.