Glass recommendation please!

[amareargentum]

Hopefully one of you wonderful boro people will be able to help me  I have been asked to make a commission piece of a spider on a web! (Great, I hate spiders)  My customer wants the web in silver (can make that out of wire , no problem) and the spider in black or dark brown glass. I'm thinking that for it to have any chance of surviving I need to make it in boro.

So far I have only had one small step into the dark side  I am on a Minor with one oxy. I bought Pipyr's tut and made a few quite successful beads. I gather that black boro is much stiffer, so......could anyone recommend a colour please that meets my customer's brief and that I have a chance of melting. The amount I need to melt should only be quite small as she wants the whole thing about 3" across.

Thank you so much for any help you can give
Amanda x

[Steampunkglass]

Northstar Jet black should be ok, and plowdens do their own black which seems okay (it seems to be a very dark violet) you can also use Turbo Cobalt - it's such a dense colour it looks black until you thin it out. Avoid Northstar black lightning as that reduces easily down to light blue and even cream when over reduced (same with GA black pearl) Alternativily what about using soft glass and making beads as the major body parts and fixing them together with silver wire to make the spider (if that makes sense?!)

[garishglobes]

If you've made boro beads, I would think you'll be ok with the black boro as long as you don't have to work too big. GA do a couple of nice blacks, TAG Blackjack is (I think) sort-of brown based and could be a good one, or even Dark Red Elvis - deep, deep red and lovely to work with. Then there's TAG Purple Sable or Momka's Charles Brown. Charles Brown is lighter and transparent, Purple Sable is kind-of coffee coloured and usually fairly hard to shift to the blues and greens. Though Sod's Law says that if you don't want it to, it will 

[♥♥Tan♥♥]

I had a teeny bit of TAG Blackjack that I pulled into a stringer to make eye dots and one of them burnt out to clear so maybe not that one? Although in all honesty I am such a boro noob that may well be useless info.

Becky Chameleon does wonderful spiders in soft glass

[sparrow]

Sean Taylor does, too They're perfectly possible in soft glass

[amareargentum]

Thank you all for the glass recommendations, that certainly gives me something to go on.
I had thought about beads for the body and that they would be OK in 104. I was worried that the legs would be so thin that they would be likely to snap. If others are making them then I guess they must be stronger than I was thinking (unless they are much larger).

Thanks again everyone - I knew some of you would have the answer 

[amareargentum]

Glenn, just re-read your post. Were you meaning to use wire for the legs? That is certainly an option if an all glass spider seems a bit delicate. Thanks for the suggestion