Tiles and such…

I’m finally revisiting an idea I had when I first got into glass fusing. I had thought it would be really cool make little scenes or abstract patterns on 2 – 3 inch square tiles and then assemble them into a mosaic.  By using tiles I would not be restricted to the size of a monolithic piece of glass (typically 12 X 12 inches) or the size of my kiln.

My apologies for not having more pictures.  Once I get focused in on making something like this I space taking pictures off. Right now this piece is very much proof of concept.

This piece consists of 16 2 X 2 inch square tiles: 8 transparent and 8 opal white.

Here you seen them already foiled and soldered together in clumps.  I had imaged mounting these groupings on some kind of scaffolding and having them spaced out as you see here.  That idea didn’t work out to well. 

Anyway the groupings are re-enforced using a piece of 12 Ga copper wire soldered to the back.

I soldered the wire in a way that it would not bisect the transparent pieces.  Anyway I decided to solder all the groupings together in a more traditional mosaic format.  It turned out to be a bit of a challenge since I had already grouped some tiles together under the assumption that my original idea was going to work. Here’s one of the arrangements I came up with.

 

Well much weeping and gnashing of teeth (and one bottle of ruined patina…don’t ask me how) this is how it turned out.

Not too bad.  I won’t be submitting to the Spring art show. One of the tiles cracked during assembly.  I plan on making a bigger one with 32 tiles.  I promise I’ll be better at documenting this next time.  I might even shoot video of this process and put in on my YouTube channel.

TTFN