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...

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."

Need another strategy...

Well, the oddness out of my kiln continues. The results of the second pot melt firing were no better than the first.  There were still glass strings connecting the pot with the fused disk below even after doubling the melt time.  Here's a shot of the disk after the second firing so you can see the cool pattern that results from the melt pot:

This disk I'm going to fire one more time at full fuse temperature to allow the three pokey bits on top to lay back down into the glass surface and to allow the disk to get to a more even thickness and roundness.  Then, the next part of the fun begins.  I have a texture plate with a swirl design embedded into the surface.  When I lay the fused disk over it and do a slump firing, it will embed the texture into the bottom of the glass.  Then I will slump it again into a wavy bowl mold to create the bowl shape.  Personally, I have to admit that I don't get how the texture will stay in the glass as it slumps into the bowl shape, but I've seen quite a lot of great results of people putting textures into bowl and plate blanks, then slumping them into shape so I'll just take it on faith that it works.

The new strategy for the next pot melt will be to keep the doubled melt time, but increase the temperature of the melt from 1600 to 1650 degrees.  Hopefully, the extra heat will create a better separation between the pot and disk.  If that doesn't work, I'll try increasing the temperature yet again in the next firing until I can get a clean disk.

First melt pot results

Cool!  Well, I found out that the instructions that come with the melt pot don't give a long enough melt time to get all of the glass out of the pot.  I've added a little more clear glass to the pot and refired again with a much longer melt time so that the glass can flow out further into a thinner disk and the rest of the colored glass that was left in the pot can flow out.  I do like the effect, though - it kind of reminds me of tie-dye.