Glow In The Dark

Perhaps I was inspired by the bright-colors-and-lights bike ride I went on last night when I decided that tonight I would finally experiment with the glow-in-the-dark glass powder I ordered. (It is not cheap, but how cool is glow in the dark glass?) I hope these puppies turn out! There was a cautionary note packed with the powder about lots of little air bubbles forming and causing thermal shock problems, and the end product potentially cracking, but I'm pretty confident that I used the stuff correctly.

So here I am starting out making a pendant. (I actually have process photos for a change!) At this point I think I've flattened the end of the clear rod, put a colored glass dot design on the flattened surface, and begun imploding the color. (Imploding basically means melting the glass at an angle and allowing gravity to pull the clear glass over and around the colored glass, so that the colors end up inside of the clear glass.)

Here's pendant #1 in mid-implosion. I wasn't sure if the glow-in-the-dark powder would come out opaque or transparent, so for this first one I decided to put a colored dot on each of the glow dots so that the colored dot would ultimately end up inside the glow glass. Not sure how that will turn out, but I'll find out in the morning after the kiln has come down.
And for pendant #2 (this is before imploding) I made the central dot with glow glass, surrounded it with blue dots, surrounded those with glow dots, and made a final (somewhat sloppy) ring with the blue. (It will look blue when it has cooled.)

And here is that same pendant #2 after I've imploded it, put a backing color on, and puntied it onto another glass rod. (Sorry about the poor quality photos.) The final step is to put a loop on top to make it into a pendant.