The Miracles of Glass

Remember this?

It just about broke my heart when that gorgeous piece broke itself.

Scott took it to Bullseye Glass to talk with some of their experts in their resource center and was told that when working with pattern bars and other extra-thick glass, he needed to give it a looooooong soak at the top temperature.

Normally, glass is fused in roughly 10 to 15 minutes at about 1490 degrees F. Bullseye tests its glass to be sure it can handle a maximum of 30 minutes at 1500 degrees, which is typically plenty for the multiple fuses a complicated piece might require.

But the reason this piece hadn't flowed to completely close all the open space in the center was because it needed a lot more time and at a higher temperature.

So Scott put it back in the kiln, this time for an hour at 1525 degrees.

And look what happened!

If you know exactly where to look, and Scott does, you can find the thin line where the glass broke after its first time out of the kiln. But to the rest of us? It's perfect, with no sign of its fault line.

Isn't it gorgeous?

Like any true artist, Scott likes to try to improve on perfection. So he made a second piece very similar to the first:

Can you see the differences? Scott added some aventurine green to the center, and also used more clear glass when he made the blocks of purple. The additional light helps keep the purple from looking black.

And here they are together:

The new one is on the left, the original on the right.

Mind you, they're not quite finished yet. Scott plans to slump them in a sushi mold, which will give them a gentle curve.

Happy Friday! Hope your weekend is a happy one!

 

Failed Experiments Are Learning Experiences, Right?

Scott holds the glass up to show me the colors and flow pattern.

Scott had high hopes for a project that would showcase flowing glass.

First he tack fused strips of deep purple and clear glass so they became 2+-inch blocks of glass. He then created a border with stripes of clear, lavender, transparent green and aventurine glass into a 12-inch square. In the center, he set the previously tack-fused blocks standing up with plenty of open space around them, and programmed the kiln for a full fuse.

When he checked the kiln the next morning mid-cycle, he saw that there were still some empty spots so he added some extra time to the program hoping the glass would finish flowing.

But when the fuse was done, the glass still had a few open spaces where the flowing glass hadn't completely filled in.

You can see two of the places the glass is pierced near the center block.

While we admired the glass, holding it up to the light to see things better, we heard a ping. And then another one. And another one.

At first, we couldn't figure out what was making the sound. I thought maybe it was Scott's wedding ring hitting the glass. Since one happened as he set it down on the work table, Scott thought maybe there was a piece of glass underneath it and it was the sound of glass hitting glass.

And then it happened again, and Scott spotted where a crack had suddenly appeared. We went to bed knowing there were several cracks, and I planned to take more photos today and this weekend we would take the piece into Bullseye Glass to find out what the experts thought had gone wrong.

Sadly, overnight, the cracks continued to progress. This morning, it had completely broken in two.

So pretty, but so flawed.

Scott will undoubtedly be back to the drawing board for another attempt after we get some feedback from the good folks at Bullseye.

Hip To Be Square! Class At Bullseye

I just realized that I used Aventurine Blue frit on all four coasters. :) I love the aventurine glass (only available in blue and green) because it has a glitter-like sparkle to it that's a little magical. I was over the moon when I saw that printing with the powder frit still gave a bit of sparkle to the look!

I am loving playing with glass!

I took a class last week at Bullseye Glass to learn how to use silkscreens to print on glass using frit (ground glass) powder. I'd seen a Groupon for it, so I paid $50 for a $100 class to make four coasters.

The teacher, Stacy Smith, was awesome -- engaging, knowledgeable, approachable and patient. Somehow she got 16 of us through some history of silkscreening and glass as well as through our projects, all in just over 2 hours.

Artist & teacher Stacy Smith shows some examples of powder printing as well as other types of glass work that Bullseye offers classes in.

Stacy had created screens for the students to use that somewhat randomly had six different patterns on them. (I got lucky and found a seat with a screen that had patterns I really liked. Not everyone was happy with what they had.) You just positioned the screen and the tile so you got the one you wanted where you wanted it.

The process was pretty easy since the screens were premade. I was excited enough about it that I think I'd like to take Stacy's four-day class, where you learn how to design and create your own screens as well as make projects using them.

When I left at the end of class, my tiles were sharing space with three other students' work on a kiln shelf:

Notice the differences in powder color compared with how they looked when they were fired. Some interesting color changes! I'm glad Stacy warned us about them. :-) I took photos of all the other students' work as well, and I wish I could have seen them after they were fired!

I'd meant to pick the coasters up over the weekend, but we were so busy that I completely forgot until Monday morning. So exciting to pick them up and see how great they came out!

I mixed patterns on all but one of the coasters, which I'd chosen an ornate, Victorian looking design that seemed plenty busy on its own:



See the sparkle from the blue frit? Gorgeous! I can see in this photo that it's blue, but in person, the pattern is dark enough that it looks black.

This one is my favorite:

Hm. I'm going to have to look at it again and figure out if that's just the way the light hit it, or if it's fingerprints, or if it has some de-vitrification on it that's causing it to look filmy in places ...

This was my first one. Took me three tries to get it so I was happy with it, and I am happy with how it turned out. If I had it to do over again, I think I'd do both patterns over the entire coaster. Might have been too much, but I wish I'd tried it while I was using their supplies. :-)

This is the only one I'm less than happy with. I wish I'd done the mint green arrows over the entire coaster and topped it with the orange alone. I added the blue dots because I was trying to cover up the gap between the green pattern and the orange pattern without redoing them. I should have started over. So funny that I managed to get the dots lined up so they were exactly perpendicular to the white streak with no pattern. Couldn't have done it if I'd tried, but when I was trying the opposite ... :-)