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?

You probably don’t want to forget this step…

Normally after I put kiln wash on a shelf I put it in the oven and let it bake 200 degrees for an hour and then bump it up to 500 for 15 minutes or so to get all the moisture out.  On this occasion I forgot to put a timer on and it ended up baking at 200 degrees for a couple of hours.  I figured this was enough, let the shelf cool down again and then used it a few hours later to tack fuse this project.

The failure to bake it at 500 degrees turned out to be a mega fail.


OUCH!
I figured I could fix it by drilling a hole in the bubble and then taking the piece to slumping temperature.  I flipped it upside down and filled the depression with water.  I cut the hole using a 1/8 inch carbide tipped glass bit and a Dremel moto tool.


Of course one hole wasn’t enough for me.  I was being a bit paranoid and tried drilling a second one because I was worried that the hole would seal up as the glass settled and I’d still be left with a bubble.  The first hold drilled clean. The second one not so much.

But this doesn’t necessarily bother me either since I had planned on putting a layer of colored frit on top and then doing a contour fuse.  I’ll just fill the hole in with frit. Unfortunately the small cracks pictured here weren’t content on staying “small” and grew to split the piece in half.  I’m still pretty confident that I can salvage it and fuse it back together.  The lesson here is you want to make darn sure you’ve got all the moisture removed from your shelf before firing something like this.
Dang! This smarts though…

Like it never even happened…

Ha.

Here’s the piece after grinding and etching just before the fire polish.

This morning I just learned…

…my kiln doesn’t heat evenly.

The hard way.

The project was simple enough.  I had this pot melt that was a bit on the small side that I didn’t quite know what to do with.

And I had this funky mold I wanted to try out.

So I got out my 12 inch ring mold, put the melt in the center, surrounded it with scrap blown glass, did a full fuse, smoothed out the rough edges with the grinder and put it in the kiln again for a contour fuse to round the edges. Now I’ve had a piece thermal shock during cool down from an annealing that was too short and open the kiln briefly when it was a 350 degrees. This is the first time something has blown up on me during the heat up phase. Now when I head up the glass I’ve been using the “rule of thumb” rates that I saw (if I remember correctly) on the Glass Campus web site. The basic rules were this:

• 6mm glass –> ramp up at 400 degrees per hour.
• 9mm glass –> ramp up at 300 degrees per hour.
• 12mm glass –> ramp up at 200 degrees per hour.

Something like that.  The blank that was in there was only 7mm thick but I used the ramp up for 9mm glass just to be safe.  Here’s what happened:

 

Ouch!

The only thing I can think of is that the the borders I’ve been using for my plates are made up of pieces of scrap blown glass.  Now even though the pieces are “fused” together their bonds may not be as strong as they are in the pot melt itself.  I’ve used the same ramping schedule on other plates but in those situations the melt made up the bulk of the plate mass and so was inherently stronger and more stable. There could have been a coating on a couple of pieces that introduced a weakness in the piece that mad it more sensitive to a kiln that didn’t heat evenly.  That’s my best guess.  I decided to go ahead and try to fuse the darn thing back together again.  This time I’m ramping up at a much more conservative 200 degrees per hour.

I did a little grinding to try to get the pieces to fit closer together and I added a few scraps along the break just to make sure the pieces thoroughly fuse together. I also put kiln posts up against the pieces to make sure doesn’t “move” during heating.  OK it’s probably a bit overkill but color me paranoid.  I’m going to need to grind the darn thing anyway because it will end up being a bit oblong from trying to mend the break.

 

I’ll keep you posted in the results..