I decided to make some decorative plates using iridescent glass. I built them directly in the casting ring on a broken piece of kiln shelf. The shelf is just big enough to hold an 8 inch ring so it was easy for me to transport the entire rig to the kiln when I was done assembling the piece. I don’t have a clamshell kiln so it’s a real pain (literally) to build something like this directly in the kiln.
I started off with a foundation of 3 mm transparent bull's-eye glass and then topped it off with a mixture of clear and transparent orange frit. For this first piece I actually cut an 8 inch circle of glass and placed it on the bottom of the ring. For subsequent pieces I used scrap glass for the bottom layer and used clear frit to make up the difference. The first layer comes to about 9oz of glass. I then used about 3oz of colored frit and the remaining 6oz was the transparent red and iridescent glass. I carefully weighted all the components so I ended up with a little over 18 ounces of glass which will create a blank about 6mm thick. So so first layer is the transparent glass, next the colored frit and finally the transparent red glass followed by the iridescent.
Here’s the shelf in place in the kiln.
All done!
I made another one using transparent blue and here’s one I did today using green.
Here’s the blue and red one with the edges ground and ready for a fire polish.
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