Another tie dye bowl
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 9:42AM ;)
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!
