Sunday, September 15, 2013

Is it…?

Ok.  Picture time!
I just recently took a bunch of scraps and glued them together…Blog_Random1











fused them into bars…
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chopped them into pieces then re-assembled…
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and fused them together into random cabochons.
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I picked out the ones I liked the to sell eventually.  The rest were ones that didn’t catch my eye or did not quite fuse completely.  I wasn’t quite sure about what I wanted to to with them but then I got and idea (which led to other ideas but I just take one at a time).  I had gotten this “Hipster” soap dish mold from Slumpy’s and thought that maybe I could somehow fuse these extra cabochons together to create a blank for the soap dish.  I would then have a Psychedelic Hipster soap dish…Ooooooo…cosmic!
Wow...I see unicorns.
Well this led to my next idea: maybe I could make something funky enough that I could submit it to our local artists' guild to be considered for display at one of their shows.  Hmmm…

So this is how I “glued” the cabochons together.

I first traced and out line of the mold an a plastic shopping bag.  I did this to make sure that I arranged the cabochons so that if I did decide to use the piece as a blank it would be big enough to cut down to the correct size for slumping.
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I laid out the cabochons and filled the spaces in between with different colors of frit.
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Now I needed to “glue” all this together using dilute elmers glue but before applying the glue with and eye dropper I used a trick from my model railroading days. I lightly misted the frit with a spray bottle filled with water and one drop of dishwashing detergent. What the detergent does is break up the surface tension so that the glue won’t bead up on top of the frit. the detergent makes the glue soak right in.
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I let the whole monstrosity dry over night before peeling it off the bag.  I then turned it upside down to the the side that was attached to the bag finish drying. One it was dry I put it in the kiln and covered it with a layer of clear frit to seal it and give it more volume.  I then gave it a border of lavender frit.
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Here’s the finished product (such as it is)
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I got mixed feelings about this. Soap dish blank or art piece?

Hmmm…well…is it?

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