March's 5 dollar headies with Takota Madrona

March's 5 dollar headies was a ton of fun! I collaborated with Takota Madrona who has mastered the fillicello to have 4 different spoons for 4 winners! The filliacello is the process of laying a spiral one way (usually with black stringer), then laying a reverse spiral on top. This creates the pattern you see, which is then hand filled with small color dots. The whole pattern is flipped inside/out later and as you can imagine is quite tedious. As you might have seen with artists like Kevin Murray, there is a lot of unique patterning and styles you can incorporate into a Filla...but well this is keeping things simple-ish.

Takota Mailed me these completed discs backed with black. I then made each spoon starting at the crushed opal/solid mouth piece. This was made by making a maria (essentially a disc in glass) that I then slowly heat the outer edge while pressing together so that it becomes solid. After the mouth piece is finished, I took some unique electrum stringer/marina stardust rainbow linework (Daniel Delashmutt pulled out) and made the neck. From there I proceeded to star the head with a nice section of super chunky crushed opal tubing. This whole process has to be done in stages with multiple breaks for each section to heat back up in the kiln. 

After I had the whole spoon prepped, I opened the end up to ~32mm and attached the disk/filla that takota sent me...which is the do or die moment. Once attached, it is required to graphite paddle the disk in and slowly melt it down/blow it out to create an even wall thickness. If you skip this step, your piece will crack and the bowl push will be terrible.  Once the spoon is a nice hollow/even disk, I pop the bowl hole, push the bowl, make a flat spot and proceed to add each opal. The opal process is a 1 opal, back in the kiln on repeat until all 5 opals were attached.  

This whole process is both quite labor intensive to make 4 and quite expensive to pay Takota, pay for all the materials/gas/equipment...which is why the club is so cool! You guys crowd source me to make cool/unique/rad items and keep me on my toes as an artist. Thank you!