Fun with Murrines!

I'm working on a complicated murrine which needs a lot of components. I am trying to keep in mind Loren Stumps admonitions of "Don't make it too big!", but I still tend to make them too large for my torch. On Sunday I tackled the next section, which took a couple of hours of custom color blending to start. The Italian glass comes in lots and lots of colors but the flesh tones are somewhat lacking...and I prefer to avoid anything like ivory which reacts, or most of the reds and oranges which can strike in unexpected ways for me! So I blended and blended and have a nice pile of flesh tones to shade with. And then I started, and of course I made the murrine too big, about 2 golf balls big. Since it was big, it needed big cones (these end up as waste glass at the ends of the pull), which took forever to heat up, and when it was finally ready to pull, first one pyrex punty popped off...and then the OTHER pyrex punty popped off, landing the huge hunk of molten glass on the edge of my table (fortunately NOT 0n my lap), right on the duct tape which holds the sheet metal on my worktable. Grabbed the murrine with hot pliers, managed to get one punty back on, (keep it hot, keep it hot), got the other punty back on, picked off all the melted-on duct tape, (keep it hot!) tried to smooth out the deep dent from the hot pliers, damn! Pulled it as best I could, cut it into pieces and threw it in the kiln.
Whew.
No pictures, which is probably just as well!
After all that, I did get some pieces which would be usable, but I'm not thrilled with the shading...so I'll be re-doing it...SMALLER!!!
As Loren said in class "It's only glass"...and a little time, and it was good practice, and I learned a lot...but I did cuss when it landed on the table! Melting duct tape is smelly!