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

Glue: My final thoughts at least for now

The last time I talked about glue I mentioned I was going to explore two part epoxy.  Well I’ve been to the mountain so to speak.

I’ve tried this.

Bzzzt! was able to pop the bails right off with very little force.

I tried this based on a review in an article I read.

Same old same old here; the bails popped right off.

So I finally relented and tried E-6000 again.  This time I applied it the way other websites and forum posts recommended.

• I used only fresh glue.  I avoided glue that had skinned over or started to become gelatinous (which means discarding at least a quarter to one third of the glue I dispensed) .
• I let the glued pieces set undisturbed for at least 48 (if not 72) hours.
• I made sure that the bail and the cabochon where “Roughed up” (which is pretty much standard procedure for any type of metal to glass bond)

If indulge E-6000 with all this fussiness (good grief I’m anthropomorphizing a glue) then I get a bond that is much stronger and two part epoxy.  It’s still not “impossible” to tear the bail off but I definitely need to use more force.

This pisses me off.  I wanted the epoxy to work because it allows me a longer working life so there is little to no waste.  It also (due to surface tension and it’s more fluid state) creates neater slope if it oozes from underneath the bail.  Finally I don’t have to let the glued pieces sit for three days. Grrrrr.  I’ll still experiment with the epoxy.  Perhaps I didn’t have the correct proportions or didn’t mix it well enough.

Oh well.

Blogger Labels: Glue,bail,glass,epoxy

2nd Pot Melt: Ok, we’re getting there.

As I mentioned in a previous post I got some scrap blown glass off of e-bay for Pot melts.  My ignorance about scrap blown glass reared it’s head pretty quickly.

Even though it looks like there’s a fair amount of color in here the colored part of the blown glass is only about  1/32nd of an inch thick (or slightly less than a millimeter).  The ratio is about 1/4 to 3/8ths of an inch clear to 1/32nd of and inch color. So for those of you who may be thinking about buying scrap blown glass you are essentially buying a box for of clear glass. Now there were some solid colored translucent pieces (green and blue) that I can use and there were also a bunch of these kinds of goodies.

I’m going to cut and grind these down to saner sizes and fuse them.  These could look real nice as pendants.

Now on to the pot.  Again it was a learning experience with different problems.  I used a Slumpy’s 8 inch mini melt this time and used a pot melt calculator to determine how much glass to use to get an 8 inch diameter 1/4 inch thick disk.  It lied or else may scale is really off.  The calculator told me I need 20oz of glass to get an 8 inch disk.  It only came out to be a bit over 7 1/4 inches.  So here’s the good and the bad.

The Bad 

• Not enough glass
• I put the the translucent blue chunk of glass smack dab in the middle of the pot and it pretty much overwhelmed the melt…well maybe not that bad but more than I wanted to.
• I mixed in glass that had a thin layer of yellow and orange.  The addition was practically of no consequence because of the clear to color ratio.
• I tried and inclusion: Mica Powder.  It didn’t behave like I though it would.  It just flowed down the hole in clumps without blending. Oops. I think it would have worked better if I had a layer or glass at the bottom of the melt and then sifted the mica powder on to it (I think).

The Good

• My kiln is level.  It was almost a perfect circle.
• No thermal shocking.
• No devit.
• Once you get past the Mica clumps it looks fairly decent (other than being a bit over blue)

All right.  Here it is. Le melt deux.

 

Ya know…I think I may go ahead and do a full fuse to get rid of the pig tail and see if the mica settles further into the glass.  The piece does sort of have and Asteroids in space kind of look.

Oh the possibilities.

Blogger Labels: blown glass,Pot melt,Melt,glass,disk,inclusion,Mica,kiln

The Joy of More Marbles

I just finished fire polishing the second batch this morning.  Overall this second batch turned out pretty much the same as the first even with a more “Bunny” firing schedule.

Here’s the second batch ready to be fused.

Here’s the schedule I used.

RAMP	TARGET TEMP	HOLD
100	900	30
200	1250	30
FULL	1480	15
FULL	960	60
75	800	45
100	700	0
200	200	0

With the slower ramp up the clear marbles didn’t shatter like the last batch but I still had internal cracking like the last time.

The orange marbles also cracked like crazy.

All the other marbles were stable but they either didn’t fire polish well or the patterns where just uninteresting.  Here’s the remaining batch before the fire polish.

After the fire polish.

Here are the results close up.

The blue marbles contained a whiteish glass that just would not fire polish.

The red marbles polished OK but for the most part uninteresting and extremely brittle.  I had a cordless phone standing on the bench next to one when it tipped over on to one of them and shattered it.

The orange ones came out the best but weren’t necessarily that interesting.

These might be good for making bolo ties.  I don’t know.  I got to think about it some more.  I was talking with Marcia (my wife) tonight and she remembered co-worker that has tried fusing marbles saying she got them at Goodwill and that they were older marbles (ca. 1970s).  It’s possible that the chemical composition of the older glass is more fuse friendly.  I’ll have to check it out sometime.

Cheers.

Blogger Labels: Marbles,glass

Playing the mailman…

Well I could have if I was faster on my feet with that kind of stuff.

I had recently been perusing E-bay looking for some scrap glass for doing pot melts.  I stumbled across a couple of auctions that had 20 lbs of scrap for sale from two different glass blowing artists.  Intrigued, I placed a bid on one of the auctions and won it. On delivery day I was eager to get home from work and find out what sort of goodies I was getting. Instead of a box of glass waiting for me I found a note in the mailbox saying that I needed to sign for the delivery.  I was pissed; It was just a stupid box of scrap glass the and seller wanted a signature?!  To add insult to injury the Postal service (unlike UPS or FedEX) doesn’t allow for same day pick up and the end of the day.

I hopped on the USPS website and ordered a re-delivery for the next day since I had the day off from work. The following day the mailman stopped by and walked up to my porch carrying this:

His face was a mixture of shock, horror and wounded puppy dog.  He immediately started rambling “I’m sorry sir I’m so sorry.  The box broke open and I can’t imagine what kind of lamp was in there that shattered and made so much glass.”

Sigh. This could have been so much fun. 

Here’s what I should have said “Oh no, Oh no.  That was fine priceless China from my grandmother that’s been in the family for 500 years that I just inherited and in turn have promised to give to my children who will now render my face concave and have me stuffed into an orthopedic shirt because they won’t get their inheritance…Oh the humanity!”

Man I’m so square.  Instead I said “Chill. It’s just a box of scrap glass.”

So anyway this is what I got.

Some of the pieces were pretty fancy so I’m going to use those to make pendants.  The rest of this stuff I’ll use in pot melts.  I’ve got one cooking right now. Pictures will follow.

Blogger Labels: Pot Melt,Ebay,glass,horror,lamp,China,artists,mailman

It was a dark and stormy night…

Well not really.  Sorry.  I couldn’t think of any better way of continuing the-saga-of-the-never-ending-pot-melt.  In the previous episode I rambled about some possible reasons the melt had spider web cracking.  Unfortunately this sight greeted me when pulled the piece out of the kiln.

 

I did more research and found that spider web thermal shock can be caused by the glass sticking to the kiln wash introducing stress laterally in the piece while it was flattening out.  It wounded plausible to me since I found bits of kiln wash stick to the bottom of the melt.  So I figured “Third times the charm; I’ll fire it on a piece of fiber paper and give it a bunny firing schedule”.

BON VOYAGE!

Well…that didn’t work either. So I opted for Plan B…

So what’s the take-home on this?

1. I created a piece to thick to begin with which required another firing to flatten.
2. I made some bad assumptions about how much the piece would thin out and had a cool down schedule that was too aggressive for the thickness of glass.
3. The kiln wash stuck to the glass bottom introducing stress.
4. I used orange glass which I have since learned that it’s one of the colors that tends to change COE under extreme heat.
5. I used some Wissmach glass In the melt and It may not be as well engineered as Bullseye glass and more apt (possibly) to change COE under extreme heat.
6. I used extreme heat – 1650 degrees.

Now many sites I’ve visited say that the glass needs to be heated to 1700 degrees to get as much it out of the pot as possible.  But I’ve also come across may sites (Delphi.com included) that recommend 1600 as the max melt temperature.  One of the reasons being that unless you have a ceramic kiln that is designed to heat to 2000+ degrees 1700 degrees is the generally the max for a glass fusing kiln and those temperatures are extremely hard on it.  I also suspect that a lower temp will also minimize any potential COE shift and that a 100 degree hotter kiln won’t really get that much more glass out of the pot.  So I think I’m go with a lower temp with the next melt and see what happens.

So what about all those pretty shards?

Random form Cabochons!

Alight you may be thinking “OK Jones. This is how crazy people roll; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results”.  Well I’m not that crazy (at least that’s what my therapist tells me).  I tried doing a proof of concept in the microwave kiln to see if would get the spider web cracks.

OK.  It does look a bit fugly since one piece of shard toppled over on the bad side but so far I’m not seeing the cracking.  So I’ll fuse a few of them and set them aside for a while to see if they start disintegrating. 

Thus endith this tale for now.

Blogger Labels: Thermal shock,Sorry,kiln,glass,Wissmach,Bullseye,Delphi,Cabochons