Notes From the Glass Studio: Making Glass Flow

This is a new piece that Scott launched into after last week's debacle.

Scott doesn't let anything slow him down for long, not even the disappointment of seeing one of his projects come out of the kiln broken. He immediately started cutting class to make three more similar projects.

Meanwhile, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to capture photos of his technique!

Scott starts out by cutting strips of glass and then tack-fusing them together into blocks.

These blocks are made of periwinkle, white and aventurine blue glass (the latter looks almost black in this photo), and were used to make the piece in the top photo on this blog post.

Scott brought a few of those blocks into the house, and they totally mystified Ellie, who wanted to know how he glued the glass together. But they weren't -- they were tack-fused, which means they were in the kiln at a high enough temperature to begin to make the glass soften but not so hot or long enough to make it completely molten.

It takes lots of those blocks of glass to make a 9-inch-diameter bowl.

These are enough for two separate projects.

Once those blocks of glass strips are ready, it's time to let them flow.

First, Scott had to find a way to contain the molten glass since he wants his piece to be about three layers of glass thick. There's something about the physics of glass that makes it want to be about 6mm (or two layers) thick and it will automagically either flow out or pull in to try to make itself 6mm. So if you want your glass to be thicker than 6mm, you have to dam it to keep it from flowing out and thinning out.

Some people use steel rings, but they're expensive and you're limited to the sizes that someone else thought were best. So Scott made his own out of vermiculite.

To keep the glass from sticking to the vermiculite, Scott uses a ring of fiber paper. The pink underneath it is kiln wash on the shelf, which serves the same purpose as the fiber paper. 

The vermiculite is bulkier than steel rings (and takes up more shelf space!), but it's more affordable and certainly far more customizable.

The blocks of glass are positioned on a circle of clear glass. 

After arranging the glass blocks on the kiln shelf, it was time to put it all in the kiln and turn up the heat.

It's flowing!  Note: If you have a kiln of your own, don't open it when the glass is molten like this unless you have eye protection!

And then it's done with its first step. Next will come adding a border, using a sandblaster to get rid of the devit, fire polishing and, finally, slumping it into a bowl.

So pretty, isn't it? Scott really achieved his goal of making something that looked like a rose. 

Yet Another Learning Experience: Using Copper Foil In Fused Glass

After fusing but before slumping.

It's hot here in Oregon, so it seemed like the thing to do was to work with some hot colors! I also wanted to play with some copper foil we bought on one of our first trips to Bullseye Glass.

I used a paper punch to make little flower cut-outs from the copper foil, first sandwiching the foil within two pieces of scrap paper. (And hey, that scrap paper didn't go to waste either -- Ellie claimed the paper flowers for an art project!)

I then chose Bullseye Compatible glass that contains sulphur in hopes of getting a chemical reaction. And I think I did!

The copper foil turned dark, almost black, but in places turned a metallic light blue, that looks super cool. I have plans to try using snowflake-shaped copper foil next time!

So that's what went right. What went wrong, you ask? Two things:

First, I had a couple half-flowers that had been punched with the foil not quite where I thought it was in its paper sandwich. No problem, I thought! I'll just put them on the edges and it'll look like they were done intentionally!

Good idea, right?

Well, the one I put on the edge of red and orange looks great. It's the one I put on the outer edge that's the problem. I apparently left it sticking out slightly when I put the clear glass on top of it. It's also possible that when the glass fused, the top layer of clear glass moved the flower slightly. Sigh. However it happened, it's not only unsightly, but it left a sharp edge.

This close up actually shows BOTH flaws! Can you spot them both?

The second flaw is that I apparently failed to get the foil flowers fully pressed down or something. They were tricky since the petals curled a bit, and I was worried that they would tear if I handled them too much.

But see that ginormous bubble on the left-most flower in the above photo? I'm sure I should consider myself lucky that it didn't burst and leave a major crater, but ... and now that I look at the photo, I see several more big-ish bubbles.

When working with layers of glass, you're always going to have some bubbles. There's just no way around it. But there's a difference between the normal little bubbles and these.

So what do I need to do differently next time?

I'll keep my foil shapes farther from the outer edges. And I'll use GlassTac to glue down my shapes and try using a wooden skewer to burnish them a little to make sure they're not trapping air bubbles.

In the meantime, I plan to visit Bullseye and ask if there's any way to fix the edge where the foil pokes out on this piece. If so, I'll slump it. If not, I'm pondering slicing the piece up and using the smaller pieces as accents in future work.

Got any other tips for me to help me avoid these problems in the future? Leave me a comment here on the blog or on our Facebook page. Thanks!
 

Making Puddles Into Cabochons

So pretty! I still need to do some work on them to take care of devitrification (looks kind of like soap scum but won't wash off with water) on some of them but I'm so excited at how well they turned out!

Scott sent me a cool link from a site run by a glass artist (Paul Tarlow) we both admire explaining how to make glass "puddles" and showcasing some of the things you can do with them.

I immediately knew I had to make some and see if I'd end up with something I could use as centers for my fabric flower brooches.

See the link above for the real tutorial, but here are photos of the steps I went through.

First, I made stacks of seven different colors of 3-inch-square pieces of glass.

I was trying for colors that would give some good contrast and eye-popping colors.

Then they went into the kiln for their first full fuse. Because the stacks were more than two layers (6mm) of glass, I had to give them plenty of space to flow out.

When they came out, they didn't look like much from the top because all you could see was the color of the glass that was on the top of the stack. (Although a couple of my fused stacks had small dots of colors underneath that must have been brought to the surface by bubbles that popped while the glass was liquid. Kind of cool, isn't it?

On the bottom of the fused stacks, though, you could see the concentric colors in rings. I didn't remember to take a photo until the next step though -- breaking the glass!

It took me several tries to break the darn things, even following the instructions on the FusedGlass.org tutorial! The first one I did was the one in the back of this photo. I have to say that I am very, very happy that I was following protocol and wearing safety glasses because when it finally broke into pieces, it kind of exploded and shards hit my safety glasses before bouncing to the floor. Always wear safety glasses if you're playing with or around glass!!

Aren't the striated layers gorgeous?

Even looking at the layers here, the colors make me smile!

I started out using a glass/tile nipper to make smaller pieces from the larger pieces. But oh, that wasn't going to work very well because it hurt my hands too much, so Scott helped me out and made it all look easy.

Then it was time to put them back into the kiln again and see what would happen.

We put them in standing on edge in hopes of encouraging them to melt into puddles again, this time showing the ripples of color on the top. It worked better for some of them than others ...

On the kiln shelf when it was removed from the kiln after firing. My puddles were all in one corner, and then Scott filled the rest of the shelf up with frit balls that he's hoping to mix up and then tack fuse together into a bowl.

Soaking them in a vinegar bath helped remove the primer we use on our kiln shelf. The little bits of white stuff in the container are primer that has already soaked off, but it took 4+ hours to get it all removed.

Now I'm looking forward to making the perfect brooches to use them on!


 

It's June, So No Time To Blog!

Scott's first fused glass plate for this weekend's regional skating competition was such a hit that he made a second. The first was donated to the Northwest Skating Foundation for raffle. This one is being donated to our skate club for a silent auction that will help raise money to send our skaters to Nationals this summer in Albuquerque.

Every year I'm just amazed at how many events, activities and other commitments pile up toward the end of the school year. Even things that have nothing to do with school or education seem to all come to a head from May through mid June.

Hardly leaves time to make stuff, much less blog about making stuff!!

Actually, the making stuff also piles up because somehow, I don't get a good teacher gift idea until May or so. Actually I collect ideas throughout the year, but somehow never get around to getting started on them and then, sometime in May, I think of something new and urgent to try to crank out.

This year, of course, we're excited about glass, and the kiln has been firing at least one batch per day for the past couple weeks.

Ellie's main teacher, Ms. Davis, has been wonderful this year. We had some school drama in the fall and ended up leaving a private school for our neighborhood public school, and it has turned out to be a wonderful experience for both Ellie and her parents. (And hey, it must have all been kismet because without freeing up that money we were spending on tuition, I don't think we'd have been able to invest in a kiln and creating our home glass studio!)

We plan to give Ms. Davis one of the "warm squares" projects that Scott initiated and Ellie helped create.



Each of the trio is unique. Two have randomly placed tiles and one has patterns. The top two were slumped in the same mold, but due to different firing schedules, came out with different curves. The bottom one was fired in a different mold and didn't come out quite the way we intended. But it's all good and fun!

And Ellie chose the glass and colors for this channel plate that I made, which she wants to give to her art teacher:

Aventurine Blue glass with red stringer in an abstract pattern. I love the way the aventurine glasses sparkle like they have glitter in them, and Ellie loves them too. :)

Assorted other teachers will get one of these ring dishes, 3.5-inch squares that I slumped in one of three different molds we have.

Pretty, aren't they?

Having Fun With Glass

Can you tell that I've got Father's Day on my mind? :)

I really like using scraps of glass and finding something to make with them.
I seem to alternate between making faces/people and doing abstract patterns. Both types get turned into magnets. (I just love magnets. I don't believe you can ever have too many. Now I just have to find customers who feel the same way!)

Scott, on the other hand, is far more ambitious than I am when it comes to glass projects. His first project just blew me away.

We have donated this piece to the Northwest Skating Foundation to be raffled off during this month's regional skating competition.

And while the skating piece was undergoing its three tack fuses, he launched a second project that he calls "Warm Squares" and I call "The Lattice Project." It came out awesome, don't you think?

Meanwhile, since the skating plate was incredibly popular when we brought it to the rink to donate, Scott has launched into making a second one that would be entered into a silent auction to raise money for our skating club.