Continued weirdness from the kiln

I'm not sure whether it's me or the kiln at this point.  It could be either or both, I suppose.  At any rate, I'm feeling very frustrated with what the combination of both of us are producing lately.  It could be that the kiln's temperature controller has gone wonky - that's Australian for "not working very well."

The bottom layer of this piece is half transparent blue and half semi-transparent brown, a layer of rainbow dichroic glass with a bubbles pattern on top with a ring of different sizes of copper washers around the edge of the bowl, and a capping layer that had black stringers melted into it.  I had thought that the combination would be very striking and it is.

The problem is that this piece has now been through 3 firing cycles and it still didn't work out right.  If you double-click on the photo, you should be able to see the crack that runs around the edge of the bowl on the left and top through the area with the washers in it.  I guess that the cooling cycle was too fast and the washers cooled faster than the glass, cracking it.

I will try refiring the piece to full fuse temperature in the hopes that it will go back to flat in a reasonable way and heal the crack in the glass.  Then I can try slumping the glass into the final form with a very slow cooling cycle to see whether I can get it to finally work.

Then, there's this piece.  I've seen quite a few pieces like it and assumed (yeah, I know) that it would work with the regular slumping schedule.  Not so much.  Perhaps it's the thickness of this particular bottle, or perhaps it's something else.  It was in the mold for an entire hour and it barely began to drop.  As you can see, it has barely lost it's round shape - it's now oval instead of round.  That's it.  It should (yeah, I know, again) have dropped fully into the mold in that amount of time.

If I take the temperature up too much higher, I might wind up losing the raised decoration on the bottle.  If I don't, I don't think that extra time is going to make it fully drop down into that mold.  I guess I'll run it again with a relatively modest increase in temperature and time and see what happens.

Days like today make me wonder whether I should be doing something different for "fun."