I'll try to hit the questions in order..
Anne, a murrine is made using almost the same techniques as a millefiori.. that is, layers of glass are built up to form a design, then pulled down to a very tiny cane. The image that started large remains intact, except much smaller. It's all glass.
If you look at our paperweights (and marbles) in our gallery pages, you will see designs similar to paperweights using mille- we tend to use concentric style in the layout.
Leni- No one in the States knows Django, I'm so happy to hear there is some recognition elsewhere for one of the greatest musicians of all time :-)
Frank, we get about 5 to 20 slices of murrine on average. We have only torches, so we can't pull down anything bigger than 2 inches without problems. To visualize the 'pull down'.. the picture I posted in this thread is a chunk of glass about 2.5" wide, 1.5" thick. It is made up of thousands and thousands of tiny colored glass strings I pulled to match the colors in the original image. Those are then fused, resulting in that block of glass. We later heated up the mass, and then stretched it very thin. That's the 'pull down' part (as Ray said in the earlier post).
Here is a link to a very basic step-by-step on making murrine:
http://www.glasskitchen.com/make.htmAll the best,
Chris and Lissa