Wow…May 27th…has it really been that long.

It’s been a  while since I posted.  The problem with blogging is that there are days when I can think of better things to do; the act of writing often feels like drudgery.  But enough wining for now.

I haven't been firing up the kiln quite as often mainly because I’ve been doing more complex pieces.  Take this one for instance:

This took a couple of weeks for this one to come together.  I like the concept and design (but don’t look to closely at the soldering job ;-/)

It was a good learning experience.   The biggest problem I ran into was the gaps between the pieces were to big. I had cut the paper templates using a patter shear that left a 1/32nd inch gap.  Well that was too big. The second mistake I made was doing the initial soldering too fast.  The gaps didn’t fill properly so when I flipped the piece over to do the back there nice deep channels for the flux to fill and I ended up with solder that constantly bubbled and erupted. Not fun.  I was being a bit paranoid because I didn’t want to overheat the glass and cause it to crack. But in spite of the drama I’m relatively pleased with how it turned out. 

I took what I learned and applied it to this next piece I made for my sister. 

Here’s the finished piece.  The soldering job is much cleaner.

Now I had a whole ton of white glass scrap from cutting the pieces for the circle and I had no clue what to do with it. I finally got the idea to do this:

I first fused a 10 inch blank consisting of transparent and white glass scrap, transparent  frit with pieces of medium colored frit scattered throughout. I then took some of the thinner pieces of scrap and arranged them in the pattern you see above.  Once I had the overall pattern I wanted I took all the pieces off and grouped them together on a piece of paper and sprinkled powered frit over the pieces to create the rainbow hue.  Using a pair of tweezers I picked up each piece and put it back on the blank.  I then put the whole thing the kiln and did a tack fuse.  Next I slumped the whole piece in a shallow bowl mold.

 

Now lately I’ve two projects in the works. I’ve been fusing tiles like crazy to make more wall hangings like the one above.

An this is another beast I have in process.  I had gotten some French curves and put them to use here.

This time I didn’t use a pattern shear to cut out the templates and after a fair amount of grinding the pieces fit together much tighter.  I’ll be using powered frit to create the same kind of gradient effect like I did on the circle piece.  I’ll be posting my progress. Well I’m done for now.

Night all!

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!

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