Sunday, December 29, 2013

OK…I get it now

Up until now I’ve been content to use Armor Etch to handle devitrification.  Quite frankly my attitude has been “Sandblaster?  Don’t need no stinkin sandblaster!”.

Well I guess junior here has met his match…

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I must have poured a quarter of the bottle on this thing.

Ouch!

Blogger Labels: devitrification,Armor Etch,Etch,Sandblaster

Monday, December 23, 2013

Pot Melt Loco Crazy

I’m finding that pot melts addicting.  Here’s some picks of what I’ve recently been doing.

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And there was much rejoicing…

Blogger Labels: plate,slump,glass art,Pot Melt,Melt

Saturday, December 21, 2013

An experiment in depth

I got an idea for a piece I want to do but wanted to do a proof of concept/prototype first and experiment with depth.  

Here are my doodling's so far.

I started out with a piece of Bullseye 2mm translucent and covered it with frit and confetti.  The confetti is covered with clear frit.  I then contour fused it.

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Here is the result.  I flipped it over so that the frit I had fused is now on the bottom.

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No I had thought I had taken more pictures of some of the subsequent layers I added but I guessed I spaced it.  I added two more layers using clear frit, confetti and some mica powder just to see how it would look doing a contour fuse for each additional layer.

The results are, well, experimental.

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I could have done without the mica inclusions plus I sprinkled a little bit of translucent orange just to see how that would look.  I could have done without that as well.  The illusion of depth worked looks pretty decent with the sun and the mountains/hills.  It’s kind of hard to tell from the picture though.

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I’ve got a couple of more layers to add.  It’s been really helpful to create a mini picture to figure out what will work best.  Final results will be posted (when I get around to finishing this).

Blogger Labels: depth,piece,prototype,Bullseye,pictures,layer,inclusions,mountains,hills,frit,confetti,mica

Resurrecting a failed pot melt

All right.  Maybe this is wishful thinking. It was the last melt I did in My Slumpy’s 8 inch mini melt bowl before it cracked. The melt suffered from using the same bowl to melt too many colors. 
Behold the melt of doom.
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It’s been sitting around for the past few weeks looking at me, mocking me, laughing scornfully (I really need to talk to the doctor about my meds… Winking smile).  I haven’t had the heart to either throw it out or to try chopping it up to see if I could make some use of it in another melt.
I’ve been giving it a second look lately.  Some parts of it look semi-sort of-possibly-decent so just maybe, maybe I could doctor it up so that it could look slightly better than half assedly decent. Maybe it could be transformed form a “piece of work” to a “piece of work of art”.
Here are my thoughts…
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Hmm…I dunno. A full fuse will reveal my folly. Anyway this is going to have to wait until after the holidays.   I’m busy making presents (and yes I know I’m waaaaay behind schedule).
Cheers!
Blogger Labels: fail,pot melt,Slumpy,bowl

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Port melt borders

I was smitten, yeah smitten, with inspiration and remorse…
I’ve been happily experimenting with pot melts for the past few weeks or so coming out with some pretty cool stuff.  The problem was I had no clue what sort of border to add to them.  I realize you don’t have to add a border to a melt; putting them in a display can be good enough.  But I wanted to make blanks that were big enough to make decent sized decorative bowls and the belts I had weren't quite big enough  I wanted them to be 10 inches in diameter.  I scoured the interwebs to see what other people were doing.  Some took their melts and did a full fuse on to circular piece of white (or clear) glass, others incorporated the border by lining the bottom of their ring forms with glass and then melting on top of it and others sandwiched the melt between two pieces of glass to add a border and to cap it.
I wasn’t quite satisfied with any of those solutions.  Not that they’re bad ideas I just thought a plain white or clear border just seemed a bit bland.  Well the answer was in the bin at my feet.  I have over 50 pounds of scrap glass I got from Ebay from a glass blowing shop in TX. There’s tons of different colors and patterns in there and it would give a nice mosaic border. 
Here’s my first attempt. I centered the melt and then added the scrap around it.  I actually had to do this one twice because I didn’t have enough scrap in there and ended up with a border with a really ragged edge.  It took more scap than I thought.
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Here is the piece after grinding and a fire polish.  Not too shabby.
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Here’s a close up of the border.
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An now for another melt.  this next one was small so I had more fill in.  I incorporated a failed bowl slump that suffered a painful thermal shock death. At the time I had thought it would be sage to sneak a quick peek when the kiln was at about 300 degrees.  Twas a bad idea.
Anway…
Here it is.
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Here it is after a grind and fire polish.
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This next one is currently in the cooking in the kiln.
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TTFN!
Blogger Labels: border,glass,Ebay,mosaic,bowl,kiln

Sunday, December 1, 2013

A few more melts plus a spiral…Sort of

Here are some more melts that have come out of the kiln.  Some of them came out better than others.

I made a five hole saucer and decided to try using more pastel colors.

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Here’s the first attempt.  There was a bit too much clear and not enough lavender and light blue.

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I tried again with more color and less clear glass.  The results are much better

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Here’s another melt with the 4 hole saucer also with more color added.

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I got a bit crazy with this next melt.  I made a spiral design with 10 holes in the saucer.

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It didn’t come out quite like I had hoped.    It’s cool in way but not without problems.  First you can’t really see any spiral pattern.  I’m thinking I should have used more colors and this particular might have worked better it it wasn’t constrained by a ring.  Second, I had some rather large pieces of scrap glass that I decided to smash up a bit in a frit maker.  Unfortunately the melt ended up with a lot of bubbles.   I’m hoping taking this beast to a full fuse (lets say 1500 degrees for 45 minutes) should flatten the piece out and also get rid of the bubbles.

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