| Original Message: Scroddled is in body; if "agateware" = slip, it is on surface, not scroddled |
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You ask if 'scroddled' is term used in glass marble-collecting circles. Not to my knowledge. In marble-collecting world, there is much attention not to the presence or absence of different-colord glasses, but to their specific pattern or lack thereof. Flame, corkscrew, hurricane, Boy Scout, bumblebee, Popeye, many other terms, defined by both pattern and color combination. If you think this is weird, compare with 'skunk,' 'eye,' 'feather' and 'gooseberry'. I made the mistake of making an analogy, which is a reasonable way to understand the difference between mixed glasses and surface treatment. But in the world of beads that differentiation certainly does not cover all cases, with all the varieties of layering, trailing, inserting recycled beads, inserting pieces of cane, mosaic and so forth. I did not mean the term 'scroddled' to apply to beads broadly. I meant it to refer to seeing different types or shades of glass that were not well marvered, and to refer to some marbles in which one of the white glasses looks waxy or fatty--that I have seen especially where distinct glasses are swirled together. But 'swirled' can mean blended as in a melting pot, so I wanted to clarify that they were *not* blended but had adjacent areas that were different in character. I am afraid that your using the terms 'swirled slip' and 'glazed swirled colored slip discs' does not paint a clear picture for me, and unfortunately I lack a copy of your book. In pottery 'scroddled' is patterning in the body, whether random or not, while slightly mixing colored slips on the surface is 'marbleizing'. In China in the Tang Dynasty some wonderful pots were made of carefully layered different clays that were then cut, rejoined, cut and rejoined again to produce wonderful mosaic-like patterns that it took a master to retain in making the finished dish or container from this material. In England, similar techniques were used I think in the 18th century to produce flame-like and chevron-like patterns. Both of these effects were within the clay body. Whereas the marbleized slip surface treatment as a pottery glaze was more like combed feather-patterns on beads: a material applied on the surface, often multi-colored, manipulated only on the surface. In pottery the difference between body and glaze is much clearer than pattern-forming and decoration techniques in glass. Even in wares that have layers of colored slip, allowed to dry one layer at a time, and then cut through -- cameo-like, or think of Daum Nancy -- there is not any discussion about whether the slip becomes part of the body. It was applied as surface slip and cut through to expose the different color of slip or different color of body, then fired. The essence is the technique, since once fired the whole is supposed to stick together! Yet the slip-glaze composition is different from that of the body, whereas in glass this difference is physically much less except as to color and opacity. Still there were parallel concerns in each field. Disparate materials had to be compatible in rate of expansion during heating and rate of shrinkage (in pottery) or rate of solidification (glass) during cooling. In marbles one can often see that one of the colors must have been just slightly harder than the other when final rounding was done, so the result was often not seamless. In beads this disparity, whether due to flux, colorant or opacifier is not such a determinant, since there is less emphasis on absolute regularity. In beads, unlike marbles or ceramics, the slightly 'off' item might be reheated and an adjustment made. A bead can be ground and then fire-polished, whereas no such thing can readily be done with pottery, and such treatment of marbles would be much more costly than to just discard defective items. If of uniform material, discarded marbles could be melted en masse for re-use, but I doubt the flames and corkscrews would be melted down. I think I am done! Snap All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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