Another tie dye bowl

I made another one of my tie dye bowls a few weeks back. This time I used a different pot to melt the scrap glass. Instead of having three rectangular holes radiating out from the center, it had five round holes like a five spot pattern on a dice (or is that die?) or domino. Again, how the glass is loaded into the melt pot makes a big difference to the finished disk the melt pot creates when it's heated.

I had a pair of bowls that didn't turn out right. The glass split down the middle of each of the bowls when it was slumped into the bowl form and I couldn't fix the problem. I tried a few times to remelt the glass into a flat sheet and then reslump it into the bowl form, but the same problem happened each time.

I'm told by more experienced heads than mine that it's either a result of mixing opaque and transparent glass in the same bowl or an incorrect slumping program where the glass was heated too quickly and dropped too fast. Since all three of the bowls that I created using a mix of opaque and transparent had the same problem and other bowls with either all transparent or all opaque turned out fine, I'm guessing that's the issue. Lesson learned - no more mixing opaque and transparent side to side. On top of each other is fine, just not in the same layer.

At any rate, since I couldn't make the bowls work, I decided to recycle them in the melt pot and this bowl is the result. I mixed in some clear glass with the bowl shards - yes, it did feel very satisfying to smash them - and then set the melt pot in the kiln to do its thing. I love the ripples in this bowl!

Again, it reminds me of tie dye and it created no problems with the mixture of transparent and opaque glass in the slump this time. I guess that since opaque glass is stiffer than transparent, it holds its shape longer than the transparent and that is what caused the splits in the other bowls. This time the blank had the opaque and transparent glasses so thoroughly mixed that there wasn't a large expanse of opaque glass to cause a split. Live and learn!

New style of plates

Thanks for your patience with my lack of posting for so long. While I knew it had been a while, I hadn't realized that I had waited that long until I went to post today. Between the holidays, moving into a new place, and lots of classes, I haven't spent very much time in the studio or posted any of my new work.

With all of the classes I've been taking, the friends that I've made in the Phoenix area, and the Phoenix area groups that I've joined, I've been spending quite a lot of time in hotels for the last year or so.  It finally made sense to buy a small condo that I can use when I'm spending time down in Phoenix. To celebrate my new space and to furnish it with beauty, I decided to make a set of bowls and plates in fused glass.

Joy plateSince I have the opportunity to design the plates any way I want them, I decided to combine my love of the fractures and streamers glass - that's the clear layer of glass with the lines and small bits of colored glass that makes up the top layer on the plate to the left - and the copper accents I've been using lately into these new plates. I also wanted to infuse intention and some of my energy work into these plates, as well. Up in the top right corner of the plate, I added a small piece of coordinating glass to write the intention on. You can click on the image to bring up the larger version that shows more of the detail.

With all of the layers on these plates, they take three trips through the kiln to create.  The first firing fuses the the colored bottom layer of glass, the copper accent and the fractures and streamers glass on top into a new sheet. The second fusing adds the small piece of glass for the intention.  The third firing fuses the writing of the intention and slumps the plate into its final shape.

I'm really looking forward to completing the full set of 8 plates over the next couple of weeks. Then I'll get started on the bowls that will coordinate with them. What fun!

More stuff from the kiln

Ages ago, I posted about a new melt pot setup that I had bought and I showed the results of the first disk that I had created using the melt pot. A while back when I was slumping some other bowls I put the melt pot disk onto my wave bowl mold and finished it off.  It turned out great!  You can click the image to bring up a larger version.

Another piece I'm working on is a square bowl done with a new technique I got off the web, called swiss cheese.  By putting clear glass pebbles on top of opaque glass, you can create a really interesting effect that does look like swiss cheese.  I didn't have clear pebbles, but I did have some transparent colored ones and I thought they might work just as well.  Unfortunately they didn't, but they created a very retro looking glass blank.  Click to enlarge this one too.

The red pebbles actually looked pale green before firing, so it seems that the heat of the kiln changes the color of those particular pebbles - that's called striking.  If I had known in advance, I wouldn't have chosen those, since I was trying to keep to blues, greens, and yellows.  I do like the result, even if it wasn't anything like what I was expecting, but I'm curious to hear what you think of it.  Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts on it.  It will be going into the kiln either tomorrow or Monday, depending on when the current batch of glass that's in the kiln now gets done.

More to come in a few days...

Opportunity knocked!

Something very interesting happened this weekend.  I had promised myself a reward for hitting a target some months back, but I never actually delivered on giving myself that reward.  So, this weekend, I decided to "stand and deliver."  I had agreed to attend a 2 hour training session on Saturday morning down in Scottsdale, so after the training was over I went shopping.

Yes, my reward was a shopping trip.  I'm not that much into shopping, but I had lost some weight recently and wanted to celebrate the win by getting some new clothes.  I was over at Fashion Square and had stopped in a department store to pick up something.  As I was walking past the jewelry counter, a particular piece caught my eye and I stopped to study it, thinking that I might be able to create something similar in glass.

One of the sales staff came up and started chatting with me about the current jewelry trends and I noticed that he was wearing a wooden ring.  When I asked him about it, he shared that he creates jewelry out of wood.  In turn, I shared a little taste of my own fused glass work.  As we continued to chat I found out that he's creating a new jewelry line of his own that will be debuted in February.  As part of his new line, he's looking for other artist's work to add to his own work and fill out his Rock Star Jewelry line.

As the conversation progressed, he shared that he was really familiar with fused glass and asked what makes my work unique.  I shared that I was really having fun incorporating copper into my pieces because the heat of the kiln changes the copper in ways that can't be predicted.  As I play with copper washers, mesh, and thick wire in the pieces, it adds new dimension to my work.  He was really intrigued, and suggested having bolts sticking out of the pieces.  I wasn't sure how to do that, but was open to the suggestion.  Bottom line, he now wants me to create AT LEAST 2 new pieces to be part of the show and his line!  Whoo Hoo!

This week, I spent some thinking about how to create pieces for the line and came up with lots of ideas.  I turned his suggestion for bolts sticking out of the pieces into an idea for using nuts and bolts as the bails for the pendants.  Here are my first tries at some pieces before they got fired:

By the way, you can click on each of the images above to see more detail and information about each of them.  The pieces should be almost ready to come out of the kiln and I'm really looking forward to how they'll turn out!  I promise to share whatever happens - good or bad...

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."