Day 3 - Pull, Cut, Pull

Day 3 is in the books.  We are now officially halfway through with the course.  Today we got to see what came out of the annealer from the pulls we did yesterday.  The are pretty good.  My whole goal for pulling cane was to master pulling square cane.  I've done a lot of round cane, but these are much harder to use in rollups, in fused blanks for slumping, or other general uses.  Square cross-sections are much nicer in this respect.  Here is a picture of me starting to heat one of the blanks to get it ready for pulling.

The next picture is of a 5" length of the cane and one 3/8" thick murrine off that cane.  The next picture after that is a close up of the two canes I pulled yesterday.

Today, we took four lengths of the square cane, wired four of them together with stainless steel wire to hold their shape during heating and the initial pick up.   I'll pull this into smaller canes tomorrow.  This is how it looks in the kiln ready to heat up for pick up.