Next phase...

Well, I didn't get the kiln shelf cleaned off and re-coated with kiln wash on Thursday, as planned.  It's turned out to be more stubborn than I anticipated, even with the four layers of kiln wash that I had laid down.  It needs to be cleaned off with a file and the kiln shelf sanded smooth again in those two spots before I can use it again.  I knew that it would be somewhat of a problem to clean off - that's the whole point of kiln wash in the first place - I just didn't have the first-hand experience with it yet.

So, I'm cheating a bit instead.  When I bought the kiln, I also got about a half dozen kiln shelves in different shapes and sizes.  My thought was that as I started to make a larger number of pieces, I could fire more of them at once by stacking the shelves.  Since each blank is relatively thin - around a quarter to a third of an inch high - I can stack quite a few pieces in the kiln, depending on the sizes of the blanks I'm firing.  When I move on to the slumping, I can't stack as much, since the pieces have much more depth.

I've picked out one of the shelves that will allow me enough room to fire both bowls and I'm coating that shelf with kiln wash now.  I have another layer to go before I can put the bowls in there and get the kiln going.  In my next post, I'll show a picture of the kiln with the bowls on their respective molds, just before I turn it on and heat things up.

By the way, in my last post I didn't show one of the blanks because I thought it would look too weird.  I realized that someone may benefit from seeing and hearing about this, so I thought I would post it anyway.  What you're seeing in this blank is air pockets created during the fusing process.

As the glass gets heated, sometimes when you use thick pieces of glass or many smaller layers between the bottom layer and the clear glass top layer, air pockets can form in the final fused glass sheet.  In this particular blank, I used very thick, laser-cut, dichroic glass geckos and some thinner green leaves over a bed of different shades of brown powdered frit.  As you can see, air pockets formed around the geckos.

I'm not all that worried about it, though.  In the next firing, I'll simply hold the temperature twice as long as I normally would at the last stop before I get to the highest temperature for the slumping process.  That will give the glass time to smooth out before it starts to form into its bowl shape.  When you see the finished piece, you'll see that it has smoothed out and formed perfectly into its shape.  This happened to me once before, when I used some thicker pieces of millifiore rod that caused a large bubble in a bowl blank.  I did the same fix last time and all was well.  I'm sure it will be this time too.