Turtle or Turdlo?

Back when one of my daughters was a toddler she had a tendency to add “lo” to certain words.  Squirrel became Squirrlo, turtle became turdlo, squid became squidlo and so on.  I would gently correct her but soon she started doing it deliberately and get the biggest kick out of my feigned indignation: “It’s squirrel not squirrlo”. It was a fun little game.  Good memories.

So what does a turdlo have to do with the next piece I put together.  I guess I’m trying to suggest something about the mixed feelings I have over how it turned out. 

I had a pot melt that I accidentally broke into a couple of pieces and I decided to go ahead and break it up some more and re-fuse the pieces into pendants.  The problem was the pieces that I had fused seemed to be a bit oversized for pendants.  I started arranging them on a 10 X 10 glass plate and at first I though I could make them look like a very abstract school of fish swimming in the sea.  Well that wasn’t really coming together to well but as I arranged the pieces I began to see another pattern beginning to form.

Here is the “turtle” tack fused to the glass.

I decided to fill in the turtle’s body with medium opaque green frit and use transparent blue for the ocean.  I dug through my scrap glass bin and found some pieces that looked fairly organic and sea shell like.

Here’s how things came together in the kiln.

Here’s the result after a contour fuse (1400 Deg @ 10 minutes).

Wow.  Yeah I suppose it came out “OK” but I’m seeing two problems with this.

1. I had envision the turtle’s body having sharper boundaries and I’m not really sure why I thought using medium frit would provide that.  It looks kind of sloppy to me.  But then again this is an abstract piece so then…well…whatever.

2.  I should have used a lower fusing temperate. it should have been more ink the tack fuse range like 1350.  the “sea shell” pieces I added pretty much lost their surface texture and slumped too much.

So is it a Turtle or a Turdlo?

I see said the blind man…

I my last post I spent a fair amount of time licking my wounds do to a massive air bubble that formed under a piece I was firing.   I was fairly confident I could fix things by doing another tack fuse.

Well it worked…sort of.

The bubble fused flat and there’s a hole where a check of glass broke off.  Not a big deal since that will be filled in with frit.

The point where I got hammered was the cool down after the anneal soak. After the piece had been out of the kiln for about a day a crack formed along the boundary of the pot melt.

I spent a couple of days scratching my head of over this one before I realized what the problem was.  I used a cool down schedule which I though was appropriate for a piece that had an overall thickness of ~9 millimeters.  the problem was my piece was not uniformly 9 millimeters.  Here’s the cool down portion of my schedule.

Ramp	Target	Hold (in minutes)
FULL	960	80
75	800	0
150	700	0
200	100	0

I think this would have been OK if the piece was uniformly 9 mm thick but this was too aggressive relative to what I was trying to do. 3mm glass is going to cool much faster than 9 mm and that’s what introduced stress along the boundary of the pot melt.  If anything I need treat as though I were cooling down something that was 12 – 15 mm thick due to the varying glass thicknesses.  Here is the schedule I plan on using next time.

Ramp	Target	Hold (in minutes)
FULL	960	100
50	800	30
75	700	30
100	100	0

I’m thinking (knock on wood) this should do the trick.

I’ll keep ya posted.

An Art Show Piece

Here’s the latest piece that will be on display at the Lincoln Artists Guild show at Out of the Box.

My main regret about this pieces is that one of the “points" is a bit cut off.  That’s how it kind of came out of the pot melt ring and it’s also due to a near disaster I had with this melt. I had a different border on it that didn’t turn out and I had to cut it off and replace it with the mosaic (and that was quite a nerve wracking piece of surgery).  Hopefully everybody will be razzle dazzled by the colors.  Smoke and mirrors ya know…

Now that was a fail (but redemption draweth nigh…)

The idea started out innocently enough.  I wanted to do another piece for the artists guild and decided to use the most eye poppingly colorful melt I had done and mount it in a 12 X 12 inch picture frame.  The plan was to add a border, tack fuse the piece on to a 3mm piece of clear glass and put the entire piece into the fame. 

I wanted to do a clear border and have pieces from another melt radiate out sort of like spokes on a wheel.  I picked out some clear glass from my hoard of blown glass and washed the pieces thoroughly.  Some of the chunks  were pretty big so I decided to break them up using a home made frit maker (I got the idea from a post on a glass forum).  now some of the glass was crushed into to small frit and I added some of that as well.  At the the time all the frit looked clean to be but as the cliché goes “appearance can be deceptive”.

Well the spokes didn’t melt (or look) like I thought they would and there were tiny dirty bubbles scattered throughout the border.  Pretty nasty looking!

After a brief expletive laden moment of fear, loathing, and panic I determined my best shot as salvaging the melt was to cut off the border using my glass cutter.  It was a little nerve racking but it wasn’t that hard to do. 

The pieces from the border ended up in file 13.  Here’s the piece after I ground the border.

I ended up going with the same collage border I had been recently using for some plates.

I think the results are a lot better!

So what happened with my frit maker.  Well when I read about it on a forum the idea sounded simple enough.  The frit maker consists of two pieces of galvanized pipe; one two inches in diameter with a cap on the end and a longer piece one inch in diameter also with a cap on the end. I put the glass in the bigger pipe and use the smaller pipe to crush the frit.  After re-reading the post, I see forgot to perform one step: I should have used a magnet to remove the bits of steel that got dislodged from the pipe during the crushing process.  That’s what made the frit “dirty”.  At least this explanation sounds good to me.

Oops!

Blogger Labels: Pot Melt,guild,glass,bubbles,plates,magnet,artists,frit maker

Now That’s a Shocker

We weren’t going to enter the juried show. At least that’s what we initially decided.  We had decided to put our works on display at the state capitol that was non-juried. But then Marcia had a phone chat with (I think) the president of the Artists Guild and after some subtle arm twisting she caved and decided to enter her painting in the juried show and I follow suit.

Well the decision paid off.

My piece ended up winning the James Ray Award and Marcia’s got honorable mention.  When I first saw the award I saw the award I thought “Oh…that’s nice…who’s James Ray?”.  He was an artist who passed away recently who had been a noted Nebraska artist and a member of the guild for the past 61 years.  The award was establish his name and it involves some sort of cash prize.  I don’t know how much but I’ll take it.

I just hope I don’t do art like I bowl.  I bowl about once every ten years or so and I usually do great the first game and then by the third I shoot below 100.

Cool beans anyway!

Blogger Labels: Juried Show,Award,Nebraska

Well, there it is…

…stuffed and mounted.

I started this beastie almost a month ago for the Lincoln Artists Guild November show.  After the final fire polish it languished for a couple of weeks in my glass rack: I couldn’t decide how to mount the stupid thing.  I finally caved under pressure (the entry deadline was coming up) and tack fused it to a piece of 3mm black. I was fortunate to find a website that sold 10 X 10 frames.  The frame’s a wee bit on the thin side but it will do.

There it is…now if I could just get rid of the fingerprints.

Blogger Labels: Tack Fuse,Frame,Show,Artists Guild,glass